In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA), which forced the USPS to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees, many of whom hadn’t even been hired yet.  Over a mere 10 year period, the USPS was required to prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years, something no other government or private corporation is required to do.  As consumer advocate Ralph Nader observed, if PAEA had never been enacted, USPS would now be facing a $1.5 billion surplus.

The USPS is a profitable, self-funded venture that is not supported by the taxpayers.  It is funded with postage stamps—one of the last vestiges of government-issued money.  Stamps are fungible and can be traded at par; and they are backed, not by mere government “fiat,” but by labor.  One stamp will buy the labor to transport your letter 3000 miles.

The USPS is one of the few businesses the government is allowed to operate in competition with private companies; it is the only U.S. agency that services all its citizens six days per week; and it is perhaps the last form of communication that protects privacy, since tampering with it is against federal law.  In 1999, it employed nearly a million people; and today, it employs over 600,000.  Where are those workers to go, when the post office is no more?

To Downsize or Diversify?

Whatever caused the financial woes of the USPS, there is another way to mitigate the crisis than slashing employee benefits and customer services.  In a December 21 article in Reader Supported News, Tim Fernholz suggested that instead of focusing on cuts, the post office should approach the problem from a business perspective and find a new way to make money.  One way to keep the USPS alive, he says, is for it to include basic banking services in its product line, providing a “public option” in banking:

[R]oughly 9 million Americans don’t have a bank account and 21 million rely largely on fringe financial services like usurious check cashers rather than traditional financial institutions. Giving low-income people access to a safe banking system will firm up their economic futures.

The Proud, Forgotten History of Postal Banking

Banking in post offices is not new.  Many countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand, have a long and successful history of it; and so does the United States.

From 1911 to 1967, the U.S. Postal Savings System provided a safe and efficient place for customers to save and transfer funds.  It issued U.S. Postal Savings Bonds in various denominations that paid annual interest, as well as Postal Savings Certificates and domestic money orders.  The U.S. Postal Savings System was set up early in the 20th century to attract the savings of immigrants accustomed to saving at post offices in their native countries, provide safe depositories for people who had lost confidence in private banks, and furnish more convenient depositories for working people than were provided by private banks.  (Post offices were then open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. six days a week, substantially longer than bankers’ hours.)  The postal system paid two percent interest on deposits annually.  The minimum deposit was $1 and the maximum was $2,500.  Savings in the system spurted to $1.2 billion during the 1930s and jumped again during World War II, peaking in 1947 at almost $3.4 billion.

The U.S. Postal Savings System was shut down in 1967, not because it was inefficient but because it was considered unnecessary after private banks raised their interest rates and offered the same governmental guarantees that the postal savings system had.

The Kiwibank Model: Postal Banks to Serve Local Communities

Postal banks are now thriving in New Zealand, not as a historical artifact but as a popular new innovation.  When they were instituted in 2002, it was not to save the post office but to save New Zealand families and small businesses from big-bank predators.  By 2001, Australian mega-banks controlled some 80% of New Zealand’s retail banking.  Profits went abroad and were maximized by closing less profitable branches, especially in rural areas.  The result was to place hardships on many New Zealand families and small businesses.

The New Zealand government decided to launch a state-owned bank that would compete with the Aussies.  They called their new bank Kiwibank after their national symbol, the kiwi bird.  But the government team planning the new bank faced major challenges.  How could they keep costs low while still providing services in communities throughout New Zealand?

Their solution was to open bank branches in post offices.  Kiwibank was established as a subsidiary of the government-owned New Zealand Post.  The Kiwibank website states:

Back in 2002, we launched with a thought: New Zealand needs a better banking alternative—a bank that provides real value for money, that has Kiwi values at heart, and that keeps Kiwi money where it belongs—right here, in New Zealand.

So we set up shop in PostShops throughout the country, putting us in more locations than any other bank in New Zealand literally overnight (without wasting millions on new premises!).

Suddenly, New Zealanders had a choice in banking.  In an early “move your money” campaign, they voted with their feet.  In an island nation of only 4 million people, in its first five years Kiwibank attracted 500,000 customers away from the big banks.  It consistently earns the nation’s highest customer satisfaction ratings, forcing the Australia-owned banks to improve their service in order to compete.

Postal Banking Japan-style: Funding the Government’s Debt with Its Own Bank

Another interesting model is Japan Post Bank, now the largest publicly-owned bank in the world.  Japan Post is also the largest holder of personal savings, making it the world’s largest credit engine.  Most money today originates as bank loans, and deposits are the magic pool from which this credit-money is generated.  Japan Post uses its excess credit power to buy government bonds.  By 2007, it was the holder of one-fifth of the nation’s debt.  As noted by Joe Weisenthal, writing in Business Insider in February 2010:

Because Japan’s enormous public debt is largely held by its own citizens, the country doesn’t have to worry about foreign investors losing confidence.

If the U.S. Postal Service were to add commercial banking to its product line, it too could use its own bank-generated credit to help relieve its debt problems. The USPS is being forced to fund the health care costs of its employees for 75 years into the future, and a large portion of this unreasonable burden is composed of interest charges.  According to German researcher Margrit Kennedy, interest composes on average about 40% of the cost of all goods and services. That suggests that eliminating interest could reduce the USPS debt by about 40%.  If the USPS became a bank, it could use the credit generated from customer deposits either to service its own debt directly—something that would effectively be interest-free, since it would own the bank and would get the profits back—or by buying interest-bearing government bonds.  The interest earned on the bonds could then be used to pay the interest on the USPS debt.

Other government agencies and local governments could improve their balance sheets in the same way.  Public institutions with sizeable capital and revenues can cut their infrastructure costs by about 40% by establishing their own banks, allowing them to avoid a massive toll in interest to private banker middlemen.

The Post Office Deserves to Be Preserved

The U.S. Postal Service is a venerable institution that is older than the Constitution.  It should be saved, and it can be saved.  One way is to support HR 1351, a bill introduced by Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts to repeal the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act.

Another way is for the post office to combine mail services with teller services, restoring the Postal Savings System of an earlier era.  The result could be not only to save the Post Office but to establish a competitive alternative to a runaway Wall Street banking monopoly that even Congress seems unable to control.

In 2005, the relatives of nine Spanish nationals killed in Rwanda and the Congo in 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2000, filed a lawsuit against the government of Rwanda resulting in the issuing of Interpol international arrest warrants for 40 Rwandan officials of Kagame’s régime.

On 6 February 2008, the Spanish Investigative Judge Andreu Merelles issued an indictment charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials with serious crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism, perpetrated over a period of 12 years, from 1990 to 2002, against the civilian population, and primarily against members of the Hutu ethnic group.

While the investigations were initially based on complaints from families of nine Spaniards who were killed, harmed or disappeared during the period at issue, the indictment was subsequently expanded to include crimes committed against Rwandan and Congolese victims, based on the universal jurisdiction doctrine. The indictment rules out the prosecution of Paul Kagame, arguing that he may not be prosecuted as long as he holds the position of President of Rwanda.

According to Spanish lawyer Jordi Palou Loverdos:

Spain’s Audencia Nacional was only met by silence when it duly and formally asked the U.N. to hand over the evidence of these crimes perpetrated against people in 1996 and 1997 or the evidence of the pillaging of valuable mineral resources conducted in these same years or earlier. The international media which had access to the UN report have made public the fact that the UN High Commissioner responsible for the report  keeps- separately from the latter- a confidential  data bank containing evidence that implicates individual Rwandan and Ugandan military officials.

In spite of threats and intimidation from agents linked to Western governments and from the United Nations, the Spanish High Court authorities are continuing to hear evidence against the Ugandan and Rwandan proxy forces of the United States in Africa.

Keith Harmon Snow has been researching the real facts of the tragedy known to the world as the Rwandan genocide since 1994, and has, along with many other experts, evidence to prove that the United States, Britain and Israel were responsible for the training, financing and covert military and logistic support of Kagame and Museveni’s forces.

On 6 April 1994, the UPDF/RPA proxy forces assassinated the Rwandan and Burundian presidents (Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira), their military chiefs of staff, and the French pilots of the plane they were flying on, thus provoking and participating in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hutus and Tutsis in one of the most violent civil wars in modern history.

Snow also presented detailed evidence of the war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity committed by Kagame and Museveni’s proxy forces, after they invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996, again backed by the Pentagon, Israel and NATO allies. The Congo/Zaire invasion was commanded by generals Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe, and they involved an officer attached to Kabarebe named Hyppolite Kanambe — alias Joseph Kabila, the strongman in Congo today.

The ongoing Rwandan occupation and plunder of eastern Congo has resulted in the deaths of some ten million people, making this the worst war since the Second World War. The Central African holocaust has been largely ignored by the global mass media corporations who are calling for “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, much as they did to justify invading Libya, by the same countries responsible for supporting mass carnage in Africa.

In spite of orders from Laurent Désire Kabila (Congo’s interim president of 1998-2001), to disengage from the Congo, the RPA and UPDF re-invaded the Congo in 1998, resulting in the Second Congolese War. Although the war is said to have ended in 2001, mass killing of the populations in the mineral rich Kivu provinces of Eastern Congo, under the leadership of these US-backed dictators, has continued to this day.

Contrary to its stated “peacekeeping” mission, the United Nations Observers Mission for the Congo (MONUC) and its follow on dependent, Monusco, has been deployed in the Congo since 2000 and has been involved in sexual violence and contraband activities. MONUC has provided cover for the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundi forces, USAID, the Pentagon’s new Africa Command (AFRICOM), and scores of Western mining corporations who are plundering the Eastern Congo.

Snow gave detailed testimony to the Audencia Nacional of the American, British, Belgian, German, Israeli and Australian mining corporations who have profited from the Pentagon’s holocaust in the Congo.  Banro Corporation, Barrick Gold and many companies run by the Blattner dynasty have profited astronomically from the pillaging of the Congolese people’s resources, as domestic warlords and Western elites enrich themselves while the local people starve.

Snow alleges that these corporations have direct links to the criminal networks run by Paul Kagame, who are plundering the Kivu provinces of the Eastern Congo and massacring the Hutu Rwandan refugees there.

Though the majority of victims have been from the populations of Rwandan Hutus, Rwandan Tutsis and Twa have also been targeted, both in Congo and Rwanda, and many Congolese ethnic groups have been targeted in the Congo. The Kagame regime is determined to eliminate all possible opposition to its rule and to occupy and annex eastern Congo to create a “Republic of the Volcanoes” controlled by Rwanda and populated with satellite US military bases.

Snow told the Spanish court that details collected by the UN Panel of Experts report of 2001 to 2010, detailing the illegal occupation, plunder and war crimes in the Congo, have been watered down by special interest groups linked to Western governments, thus shielding Western corporations and governments from scrutiny by the International Criminal Court and the Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.

Trained in the notorious Fort Levenworth, Kansas (USA) and advised by former British prime minister Tony Blair, Paul Kagame is without question one of the most evil dictators in modern history. The scale and intensity of his atrocities dwarf those of Pinochet, Suharto and Somoza combined.

In spite of expertise gained on the ground throughout Central Africa spanning 20 years, expert testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2001, extensive work as genocide consultant to the United Nations and numerous meticulously documented reports, Keith Harmon Snow’s work continues to be ignored by the corporate media and many outlets who claim to be ‘progressive’ and ‘independent’ .

According to  Snow:

U.S.-based groups fronted by the intelligence and defense establishment and pretending to be ‘grass roots non-government organizations’ — such as the ENOUGH project, Raise Hope for Congo, Resolve, STAND and Save Darfur — have co-opted the grass roots movement and are whitewashing the issues and controlling the media, academic and public spaces to prevent the true grass roots voices for Central Africa from being heard and to prevent the deeper issues from being understood.¹

In preparation for a documentary film to be released next year on the African holocaust, Keith Harmon Snow has just completed a series of interviews with distinguished scholars, investigative journalists and lawyers from France, Spain, Germany, Camaroun and Rwanda. The film, as yet untitled, is expected to be aired in film festivals throughout the world and will also be available online for mass viewing.

Rwanda and the Congo belong to the ninth circle of global capitalism’s Dantesque inferno. It is the circle of betrayal; betrayal of the high ideals of the United Nations to uphold the rule of law and work towards the goal of international peace and stability; betrayal of the trust ordinary citizens of the world have in media corporations to tell them what is really happening in the world, so that leaders and potentates can be held to account.

Uncovering the truth about the role of Western imperialism in the violence that has beset Central Africa since the fall of the USSR to the present day, is of vital importance, as the obscene and racist myth of an African genocide America “failed to prevent” constitutes the mendacious and  insane basis for the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

Western governments and their pro-Kagame lobbies in the mainstream media are quick to smear as ‘genocide deniers’ those who challenge the lies and distortions of the official genocide narrative of the current Rwandan régime by exposing the inconvenient and politically incorrect facts. In the case of Rwanda and the Congo, it should now be abundantly clear who those genocide-deniers are.

1. E-mail correspondence with Keith Harmon Snow

The economy would only be the better for it, as was shown by the G.I. Bill, which provided virtually-free higher education for returning veterans, along with low-interest loans for housing and business.  The G.I. Bill had a sevenfold return.  It was one of the best investments Congress ever made.

There are arguments against a complete student debt write-off, including that it would reward private universities that are already charging too much, and it would unfairly exclude other forms of debt from relief.  But the point here is that it could be done, and it (or some similar form of consumer “jubilee”) would represent a significant stimulus to the economy.

Toxic Student Debt: The Next “Black Swan”?

The Occupy Wall Street movement is heavily populated with students.  Many without jobs, they are groaning under the impossible load of student debts that have been excluded from the usual consumer protections.  A whole generation of young people has been seduced into debt peonage by the promise of better jobs if they invest in higher education, only to find that the jobs are not there when they graduate.  If they default on their loans, lenders can now jack up interest rates and fees, garnish wages, and destroy credit ratings; and the debts can no longer be discharged in bankruptcy.

Total U.S. student debt has risen to $1 trillion—more than U.S. credit card debt.  Defaults are rising as well.  According to Department of Education data, 8.8 percent of recipients of federal student loans defaulted in FY 2010, up from 7 percent the previous year.  With an anemic recovery from a severe recession and a difficult job market, the situation is expected to get worse.  The threat of massive student loan defaults requiring another taxpayer bailout has been called a systemic risk as serious as the bank failures that brought the U.S. economy to the brink of collapse in 2008.  To prevent another disaster like the one caused by the toxic debts on the books of Wall Street banks, we need to defuse the student debt bomb before it blows.  But how?

The Federal Reserve could do it in the same way it defused the credit crisis of 2008: by aiming its fire hose of very-low-interest credit in the direction of the struggling student population.  Since September 2008, the Fed has made trillions of dollars available to financial institutions at a fraction of 1% interest; and in audits since then, we’ve seen that the Fed is capable of coming up with any amount of money required or desired.  To the Fed it is all just accounting entries, available with the stroke of a computer key.

The Fed is not allowed to lend to individuals directly, but it can buy Treasury securities; and with the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) of March 2010, the Treasury is now formally in the business of student lending.  The Fed can also buy asset-backed securities, including securitized student debt; and there is talk of another round of quantitative easing aimed at just that sort of asset.

After QE3: The Market Wants More

When the Federal Reserve’s expected “QE3” turned into the tepid and ineffectual “Operation Twist,” the stock market reacted by plummeting.  To appease investors, Chairman Ben Bernanke then assured them that the Fed was “ready to do more.”  How much more and in what way wasn’t specified; but Alan Blinder, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, suggested some possibilities.  He wrote in the Wall Street Journal on September 28th:

To maintain the size of its balance sheet, the Fed has been reinvesting the proceeds in Treasurys. But starting “now” (the Fed’s word), and continuing indefinitely, those proceeds will be reinvested in agency bonds and MBS instead. . . . A future round of quantitative easing (QE4?) that concentrates on private-sector securities like MBS, rather than on Treasurys, is now imaginable. . . . Indeed, if we indulge ourselves in a bit of blue-sky thinking, we can even imagine the Fed doing QEs in corporate bonds, syndicated loans, consumer receivables and so forth.

Syndicated consumer loans include asset-backed securities (ABS) of the sort purchased by the Fed through its Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) created in November 2008.  According to the Fed’s website, “Eligible collateral initially included U.S. dollar-denominated ABS that . . . are backed by student loans, auto loans, credit card loans, and loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration (SBA) . . . .”

Buying securities backed by bundles of student loans thus falls within the Fed’s purview.  Quantitative easing is a tool reserved for economic crises, and toxic student debt appears to be the next “black swan” on the horizon.

Buying up a trillion dollars in student loans could be a nice stimulus package for the economy. The money supply is estimated to have shrunk by about $3 trillion since the 2008 collapse of the “shadow” banking system (an array of  non-bank financial institutions including investment banks, hedge funds, money market funds, SIVs, conduits, and monoline insurers).  In July 2010, the  New York Fed posted a staff report on its website titled “Shadow Banking,” showing that the shadow banking system had contracted by $4 trillion since its peak in March 2008, when it was valued at about $20 trillion—actually larger than the traditional banking system, which was then only about $12 trillion.  By July 2010, the shadow system was down to about $16 trillion and the traditional system was up to about $13 trillion, leaving a $3 trillion gap to be filled.  Adding back a trillion dollars in student aid could go a long way toward curing this shortfall.

Debt Relief as Economic Stimulus

What could such a stimulus do for the economy?  Consider the G.I. Bill, which provided free technical training and educational support, along with government-subsidized loans and unemployment benefits, for nearly 16 million returning servicemen.  Economists have determined that for every 1944 dollar invested, the country received approximately $7 in return, through increased economic productivity, consumer spending, and tax revenues. The G.I. Bill not only made higher education accessible to all, but it created a nation of homeowners, new technology, new products, and new companies, with the Veterans Administration guaranteeing an estimated 53,000 business loans.

Eliminating, reducing or deferring student loan debt would free up the budgets of millions of students, allowing them to spend more on goods and services, increasing demand and creating jobs.  More jobs would mean more taxes for the government, and a more educated and skilled work force would mean higher paying jobs in higher tax brackets.

What the economy sorely needs today is purchasing power.  Without customers to buy their products, businesses cannot expand and cannot hire.  And to get the needed purchasing power, consumers need more money in their pockets.  Getting it there by quantitative easing has been branded dangerously inflationary, but with a $3 trillion hole in the money supply, we need an injection of new money today.  As long as the money is spent on goods and services rather than on financial money-making-money schemes, the result will not be inflationary.  Retailers will just put in more orders for goods, causing producers to produce more and to hire more workers to do it.  Supply will rise along with demand, keeping prices stable.  Overall prices will not increase until the country hits full employment, which is far from where we are today.

Another Alternative: Interest-free Student Loans

Many countries offer free tuition for higher education, including Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway, Scotland, and Sweden.  Another program that has proven to be very fair and workable is a program of interest-free student loans.  The government of New Zealand now offers 0% loans to New Zealand students, with repayment to be made from their income after they graduate.  For the past twenty years, the Australian government has also successfully funded students by giving out what are in effect interest-free loans.

The loans in the Australian Higher Education Loan Programme (or HELP) do not bear interest, but the government gets back more than it lends, because the principal is indexed to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which goes up every year.  The indexation rate was 2.8% in 2006 and 3.4% in 2007.  To avoid this increase, borrowers can make voluntary repayments, for which they also get a 10% reduction in the principal.  Thus if a person voluntarily repays $1000, the debt is reduced by $1100.  The loans are “contingent loans,” repaid only if and when the borrower’s income reaches a certain level.  If the borrower dies, any compulsory repayment must be paid from his estate, but the remainder of the debt is canceled at death.

Following the Australian model, the Federal Reserve could buy up $1 trillion in U.S. student debt, waive the interest, and collect on the principal only when the borrowers’ incomes reach a certain level.  In the meantime, the loan money would circulate in the economy, stimulating economic activity.

Even assuming a 10% default rate, the Fed would get back $900 billion on its $1 trillion advance.  The $100 billion difference is only one-seventh the bailout money authorized by Congress to rescue Wall Street banks, and it would stimulate the economy more than the bailout money, which just shored up the balance sheets of insolvent Wall Street banks—banks that then declined to return the favor by lending to Main Street.  If the Fed’s investment generated anything close to the returns from the G.I. Bill, its $100 billion outlay could produce a several-hundred-billion dollar return.

To prevent abuse of the system, colleges should be required to stay within certain well-defined parameters for providing affordable, high quality education; and students should meet well-defined standards as well.

Properly monitored, a federal investment in higher education can be a win-win-win, good for the economy, good for the government, and good for the people.  A generous student loan program will create jobs, increase tax revenues, and give young people a fair shot at the American dream, a dream that has become a mirage for 99% of the population.

India has consistently refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)—the cornerstone of international efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons—categorically stating that the treaty amounts to political apartheid by permanently dividing the world into nuclear haves and nuclear have-nots. India has also rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT)—intended to prohibit any nuclear explosion on the planet—again on issue of principle.  While the CTBT does not explicitly contain the NPT-style divisiveness in its text, India’s principled stance emerged from the fact that the treaty lacks a clear commitment from nuclear weapon states to disarm existing nuclear arsenals within a time-bound framework. The CTBT cannot enter into force until signed and ratified by 44 states listed in Annex 2 of the treaty. To date, nine of these 44 countries have yet to ratify the treaty. India, in good company with Pakistan and North Korea, has not even signed the treaty.

There is no denying that India’s moral song became a little harder to hear after it became a de-facto nuclear weapons state. Some suggest that this is because the credibility of the country’s minimum deterrent is questionable and further tests are necessary to augment its capability, others that acceding to the CTBT in its current form would contradict India’s historic stance on disarmament and weaken its standing in the international community. Whatever the case, expressing contempt for the shortcomings of an international instrument without facilitating the work that needs to be done to reach a solution does not exactly smack of enlightened moral leadership.  If India is truly as committed to global nuclear disarmament as it was in the days of determined leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi, it must re-assess its stance on the CTBT.

Instead of criticizing Australia’s decision not to “emulate the United States in recognizing that India merits an exception on nuclear supplies,” both India and the United States would do well to take a page from Australia’s book, one of the earliest ratifiers of the CTBT. India’s long-touted ‘impeccable record of non-proliferation’ does not provide a moral warrant for it to circumvent internationally established instruments of law and co-operation. Moreover, when India has already declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, what is the profound difficulty in making this commitment legally binding? A no-first-strike policy appears to translate to a no-first move-policy too, as India refuses to lead—as it has before—an active, committed and urgent initiative to achieve global nuclear disarmament.

It would also be prudent for “energy-starved” India to explore less controversial, more environmentally-friendly forms of energy for its burgeoning population, especially in light of disasters like those at Chernobyl and Fukushima, growing issues with the secure disposal of nuclear waste, and decisions by some countries to phase out nuclear power entirely.  The Indian people are, perhaps, more attuned to these concerns than their government, judging by ongoing protests against proposed nuclear power plants, ranging from Jaitapur in the West to Kudankulam in the South.

Perhaps the author’s most surprising remark was this: “In fact, India has all the uranium it currently needs from other suppliers; the issue is one of principle.” If India already has all the uranium it needs—must it hold a petulant grudge against those who deny it the unnecessary? India has already built and tested nuclear weapons, declared and been recognized as a nuclear weapons state, and acquired a  country-specific waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group that grants it full civil nuclear cooperation in spite of not being party to the NPT.  Acknowledging all this, can it not now instead prioritize shared concerns, capitalize on similarities with the nations of the Commonwealth, and contribute to building a world based on inclusiveness instead of pettiness?

At a time when much of humanity is re-discovering commonality and rising in co-operation, it seems that India once again revels in being the exception. Insular interests of state sovereignty and national security continue to push India to retreat to its safe seat on the fence in most every important international issue that is not seen to directly impact it. From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, it is clear that even non-violence is no longer India’s baby.  It is high time for India to get off its moral high horse and start working in the trenches, offering its vast moral and spiritual legacy and resources to heal the wounds of a hurting world. I should like to think that “rumours” of the Indian Prime Minister’s reasoning regarding his decision not to represent the country at the Commonwealth Meeting in Perth are just that—rumours. Otherwise, it bears noting that in this regard Mother India is, unfortunately, acting like a child.

Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay recently met with U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to discuss bilateral security cooperation issues. In a news release, Minister Mackay praised the Canada-U.S. partnership as unique and explained, “Our binational command in NORAD, as well as the daily operation between our military and defence teams is a tangible demonstration of how we stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States in the defence of North America and in addressing common global challenges.” He went on to say, “We are proud to work alongside our U.S. friends in the Americas, in Libya, in Afghanistan, and as transatlantic partners of NATO.” At a press conference following their meeting, Secretary Panetta acknowledged that both countries are looking to improve their bilateral engagement in the Western Hemisphere. He stated, “If we can develop better capabilities and partnerships throughout the hemisphere, that’s something that I think both of us consider to be a real step forward in our relationship.” Future plans could also include expanding a security perimeter framework beyond North America.

While addressing North American security efforts during a news conference with Secretary Panetta, Minister Mackay brought up the Permanent Joint Board on Defence (PJBD) which was created in 1940. The PJBD, “is the senior advisory body on continental defence. It is composed of military and diplomatic representatives from both nations.” Over the years, it has, “served as a strategic-level military board charged with considering, in a broad sense, land, sea, air and space issues.” This includes areas concerning, “policy, operations, financial, logistics and other aspects of Canada-U.S. defence relations.” Although the PJBD has been used as an alternate channel of communication, it appears to have once again become more relevant as a venue for bilateral security and military dialogue. In a move which represents its growing importance, President Barack Obama recently appointed former Congressman John Spratt, chairman of the U.S. section of the PJBD. In the coming years, the board could play a significant role in plans for a fully integrated North American security perimeter, as well as in other facets of the evolving Canada-U.S. partnership.

Released in 2008, the Canada First Defence Strategy remains the blueprint for rebuilding a modern military with clearly defined missions and capabilities. This includes increasing Canadian Forces recruitment levels, raising military spending, as well as improving and replacing equipment. The goal is for Canada to, “be a strong and reliable partner in the defence of North America, and project leadership abroad by making meaningful contributions to international security.” It goes on to say that Canadian-U.S., “armed forces will pursue their effective collaboration on operations in North America and abroad. To remain interoperable, we must ensure that key aspects of our equipment and doctrine are compatible.” It also outlines a strategy which will work towards the, “ability to conduct six core missions within Canada, in North America and globally, at times simultaneously.” Besides promoting continental perimeter security, the document lays the foundation for a more aggressive and ambitious foreign policy which increasingly represents U.S., as well as British interests.

In a recent bilateral visit to Canada, British Prime Minister David Cameron met with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and addressed a joint session of parliament where he proclaimed, “We are two nations, but under one Queen and united by one set of values.” Both leaders issued a joint declaration entitled A Stronger Partnership for the 21st Century which committed to renewing bilateral relations in areas of prosperity, security and development. They pledged to, “create greater interoperability between our defence forces and deepen cooperation on procurement and capabilities.” This included strengthening cooperation on counter-terrorism issues. They also agreed to, “work toward a reinvigorated Commonwealth.” In conclusion, the leaders stated, “We commit ourselves and our governments to achieve what we have set out in this declaration to collaborate on our commerce, foreign policy, defence, security, development and intelligence relationship.” In a move which some have criticized as a step backwards, Canada has re-established the connection between the monarchy and its military by renaming Maritime Command and Air Command back to the former titles of Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force.

In September, Canada’s Defense Minister Peter MacKay was in Australia and New Zealand for separate meetings to further build bilateral security relations in the Asia-Pacific region. While in Australia, he met with several ministers where, “they discussed defence reform, procurement practices, general Asia-Pacific defence issues, and the transformation of the Australian Defence department.” Minister Mackay, “emphasized the strong military ties between both Australia and Canada and Canada’s ongoing interests in the Asia-Pacific region.” During his trip to New Zealand, Mackay met with his counterpart and discussed, “the state of current defence operations, defence reform and procurement.” The meetings in both countries were, “an opportunity to deepen Canada-Australia and Canada-New Zealand bilateral ties, to discuss military operations and defence transformation, and to exchange views on regional and international matters of operational and strategic importance.” This is part of Canada’s ongoing efforts to further expand its global influence and it could be directed against China who has gained much power in the region.

While in the past Canada has exercised a more independent foreign policy, in many ways, it has now succumbed to the imperialistic aspirations of the U.S. and NATO. The war in Afghanistan and the continued bombing in Libya have demonstrated Canada’s willingness to use military force to advance foreign policy. It appears as if they have also turned back the clock by further embracing the monarchy and renewing its strategic partnership with Britain and the Commonwealth at large. Under the influence of a declining Anglo-American Empire, Canada has shed its peacekeeping image in favor of a more aggressive and militaristic doctrine. In the coming years, Canada will be expected to contribute even more to global security including participation in future U.S.-NATO military operations.

You did your readers and all working people a grave disservice today. By titling a column about hundreds of thousands of miners around the world going on strike for better working and living conditions a “strike contagion” — and thus associating actions by workers with germs, plague, and disease transmission — you forgo journalistic integrity and objectivity for something base and, quite honestly, cruel.

The Pike River disaster, in which two Australian miners were killed, was just one of the deadly accidents that happen almost every day in mines around the world. I know — I blog and tweet each and every one of them @coalmtn.

Miners trying to protect their livelihoods — and their lives — by striking for better wages and safer working conditions are quite simply the opposite of a contagion. They are, in fact, a cure for the deadly disease of corporate greed and rampant safety violations in the global mining sector.

And the Sydney Morning Herald should be embarrassed by calling the cry for justice by these miners, or any working people, a contagion.

Mark Nowak

Soldiers killed in action, deaths of civilian Afghani’s, and staggering costs are some of the reasons for foreign troops to exit Afghanistan.

American fatalities — 1590 between 2001 and 2010 — and Australian fatalities — 26 between 2002 and 2010 — are just one element driving the debates in America and Australia. There have been accusations that soldiers from America and Australia (as well as other coalition states) are responsible for civilian deaths, however it is unclear how many Afghani’s have died as a result of soldiers negligence. To date no American or Australian soldiers have been prosecuted. About 9000 Afghani civilians are thought to have been killed in the conflict: over 2700 in 2010 alone. The cost of the war is staggering. The U.S. military is on track to spend US$113 billion on its operations in Afghanistan in the 2010-2011 fiscal year, and is seeking US$107 billion from Congress for 2012-2013. Driving opposition by some Republicans in American is a bill they estimate to be about US$10 billion a month (at a time when the federal deficit is expected to reach US$1.5 trillion this year). Australia is spending AUS$1.7 billion a year on oversees troop commitments in Afghanistan.

Public support for the war in Afghanistan is also waning. A Galaxy poll (4 June 2011) shows support for the Australian war in Afghanistan at only 19 per cent, while 62 per cent of those surveyed want Australian troops out of Afghanistan in the next six months. Only one in five Australians thinks the war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, are being won, compared with almost one in three Americans. The message is less clear in America. Following the killing of Osama bin Laden, there has been an upsurge in concern that America will face retaliatory attacks. This is reflected in Pew Research that indicates only 48 per cent of Americans support withdrawal of U.S. troops. Conversely, 63 per cent believe that troops will “succeed”. It is unclear how Americans (or Australians for that matter) will measure ‘success’. An earlier CNN opinion poll (3 January 2011) more clearly indicates that more than six in ten Americans oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The poll found that 56 percent of the American public believes that things are going badly for the U.S. in Afghanistan.

In America, Obama is facing bipartisanship calls for U.S troops to be pulled out of Afghanistan. Recently 178 Democrats and 26 Republicans voted to pressure Obama into an immediate withdrawal. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Democrat, California) has argued that: “Americans are paying a big price.” For Republican Jim McGovern (Massachusetts): “Too many people have died in Afghanistan. There is no clear mission.” Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (Democrat Maryland) insisted that because of the killing of Osama bin Laden, the stakes have changed: “His death is a moment for reflection on that struggle (in Afghanistan)… many of the terrorists against which we are fighting are no longer located in Afghanistan.”

In Australia, Gillard is facing pressure from both the House of Representatives and the Senate. In a minority government, Gillard requires the support of four Independents. One of those is Andrew Wilkie (Tasmania). Wilkie, a former intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments who ‘blew the whistle’ over the emptiness of the Howard government’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, opposes the war in Afghanistan. He has said: “One of the big lies of this federal election campaign [2010] is that we have to be there to fight terrorists for Australia’s national security.” Leader of the Australian Greens in the Senate, Bob Brown, has consistently called for Australian troops to withdrawn from its “invasion” of Afghanistan. The Greens will hold the balance of power in the Senate from 1 July 2011.

Gillard it also facing pressure from the mainstream media with even neo-conservative pro-war commentators such as The Australian’s Foreign Affairs editor, Greg Sheridan, calling for a withdrawn of all troops from Afghanistan. He has recently written: “Australia is losing the stomach to ask any of its brave and brilliant young soldiers to be the last man to die for a losing cause in Afghanistan… No matter what we do, we cannot win in Afghanistan… We have known that for a long time.” The Prime Minister and Chief of the Defence Force’s mantra that Australian forces are succeeding in their mission in Afghanistan seems more and more hollow in the face of Sheridan’s influential comments. As former Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh (who served in Afghanistan from 1986 to 1988) says: “I for one am fed up with the half truths and lies emanating from senior defence officers over all aspects of Australia’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan; a war in which the original objectives have long since disappeared.”

The initial objectives (always problematic in terms of a ‘just’ war) have been replaced by an ongoing war, with undefined objectives, and lacking moral authority. Human Rights Watch 2011 World Report have found a litany of human rights breaches that have either been perpetrated by foreign troops or sanctioned by foreign governments. For example, the U.S. military is thought to be detaining 1 000 Afghani’s as prisoners in their own country. It has emerged that President Hamid Karzai (who only rules with American support) has quietly introduced a law that provides amnesty to perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The U.K. and E.U. are pursuing plans to build asylum seeker detention centers in Kabul in order to repatriate unaccompanied children, despite concerns over security and lack of safeguards. Military action has caused widespread internal displacement of civilians. The Red Cross reported a thousand weapon-related injuries to civilians in 2010, double that of 2009. These claims, never mind the deaths of soldiers and civilians and spiraling costs in the face of a global recession, should have Australian and American citizens clamoring for an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan.

It is getting more and more difficult on any grounds — politically, economically or morally — to ‘stay the course’ in Afghanistan. Australia should withdraw now: it will once Obama does and there seems no other strategy available to the American president.

I went to the 2011 Sydney Writers Festival and spent much of the time waiting in lines hoping to get a seat at one of the free lectures. I am unwaged and subsist on government welfare. Along with up to 30% of my fellow citizens I belong to Australia’s underclass as I am denied the right to work in this country. It is not because we have been critical of the government but because we were born without the right class connections. Our country is not a meritocracy and is riven by inequality. Here it is not what you know but who you know that determines your fate in life.

Anyway after waiting so long for a free seat at the Sydney Writers Festival and just missing out so many times I thought my luck had finally turned when someone offered me a free ticket to the Liao Yiwu lecture: “ The dangers of what we think we know”. Well Liao, I guess I wasn’t so lucky after all because when I arrived a columnist from the Murdoch press, Miriam Cosic of the Australian newspaper, was there to tell us that the Chinese government wouldn’t let you come to the Festival. Cosic explained to the audience that there had been another crackdown on artists and writers in China. She read your letter thanking would-be sponsors. It went on to say how cruelly your government has treated you and how free Australia must be for inviting you. Nodding knowingly to her middle-class audience (many of whom were clutching fistfuls of lecture tickets at $20 and $30 each – enough to feed a welfare family for a week) she pontificated: “We here in Australia have no idea what it must be like to live under constant government crackdowns as they do in China”.

Funny that, because only the previous week the Federal budget announced yet another government crackdown on welfare recipients starting with teenage mums and disabled youth. Teen mums are to be separated from their babies at six months old to do compulsory job training or Work for the Dole programs. Young disabled citizens will not only need specialist medical reports to support their claim for an allowance but letters from at least three employers saying they are unable to employ them because of their disability. The crackdown will put these Australians on the same degrading treadmill of harassment, pernicious activity tests and surveillance as the unemployed who daily run the risk of being breached for even minor infractions. Every waking hour is to be spent justifying their existence to a parasitic bureaucracy and job service goons. Then when they suffer mental breakdown, a bunch of Canberra public servants (in the guise of Get Up!) only dealing with the symptoms not the causes, call for more psychiatrists. This is medicalising the social problems of inequality, lack of meaningful work, economic exclusion and institutional bastardisation of Australia’s underclass.

Many people with secure, well paid jobs are fond of saying that there is no poverty in our country but in reality a third world exists within a first world here. It is a hangover from Victorian England that the have-nots of our country are judged as either deserving or undeserving poor according to warped, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant values dominant since the industrial revolution. The well off mainly empathise with the hardship and injustices suffered by citizens from other parts of the world yet deny the basic human rights violations happening in their own backyard. Despite Australia being a signatory to the United Nations Human Rights Charter guaranteeing every citizen the right to work, job seekers are locked out of our economy.

With all the mineral wealth that lies beneath Australian soil there is never any thought that lower class families should share in this wealth even though as part of our Commonwealth it belongs to all of us. Yet as the mining boom rages, the contrast between high and low income earners has never been greater while money generated from our country creates bloated executive salaries and is siphoned off to other parts of the world. When you look at maps of the world showing each nation’s endowment of natural resources, you find that generally those that have the most minerals and energy per capita also have the largest contrast between rich and poor and Australia is heading the same way.

Australia had almost full employment from the Second World War until the mid-70s when in response to OECD pressure policy makers deliberately created a permanent underclass of unemployed citizens (further research is available from the Centre For Full Employment and Equity at the University of Newcastle). This underemployment was to discipline the workforce and force us to accept lower wages and conditions using the coercion of job insecurity. The government figured that having a workforce terrified of unemployment would make us docile and we would censor ourselves without the need for a heavy-handed secret police. The added advantage was that the steady growth in living standards and workers’ wages occurring after World War II could be diverted into the pockets of company executives, foreign corporations and the ruling elite.

Using the OPEC oil shock as the cover story the government set about shrinking the public sector which had been a traditional employer of workers who couldn’t be absorbed into the private sector. The government printery, shipyards and rail workshops all started closing as jobs were subcontracted offshore. There was further hollowing-out of employment opportunities as essential services became privatised. Factories started closing and the manufacturing sector contracted as import tariffs were steadily removed. While politicians were claiming that it would make Australia more efficient we started hearing new terms bandied about like downsizing, slim-lineing, deregulation and restructuring. Almost overnight jobs became scarcer and our national wealth became redistributed towards the big end of town. For the first time in 1981 when state teacher trainees graduated as high school art teachers virtually none obtained full-time teaching positions with the NSW Education Department and most ended up on 30 year waiting-lists. Rather than employ these Australian graduates the government, driven by ideology, preferred to import teachers from Canada.

To ensure there is never much sympathy for those without work the government and media barons peddle the Orwellian lie that Australia has full employment and simply cook the books. The unemployed and underemployed are labelled as dole bludgers, job snobs, cruisers and losers. They have only their own character flaws to blame for their misfortune so the story goes. Many with university qualifications have tried over 300 times to get a job but are still unemployed so how can that be full employment? Perhaps they lack skills the economy needs and should have trained in something more practical. Maybe if they retrained as Latin graduates, like the CEO of Westpac, they could get a job earning $9.5 million a year.

But the problem really isn’t that there is insufficient employment but only that there is insufficient funding of employment. The Local Government Association alone has identified enough unfunded jobs needing to be done to employ every jobless Australian. If only we could use some of the super mining profits being dug out of the ground to fund these needed jobs with a resource tax. Everyone would have a place in society instead of holding unemployed and casual workers hostage to the job service merry-go-round. All this money from the mining boom employs only 1% of Australians yet miners import trained workers from overseas rather than train the job-seekers that are already here.

In China Liao you got four years gaol for writing a poem about Tiananmen Square. In Australia Lance Sharkey got three years for saying Australian workers would welcome the Soviet army if they arrived here. Four years sentence for a poem, three years gaol for a sentence – what’s the difference? Well Lance certainly wasn’t lionised by the Australian media or showered with glittering prizes and book deals which is a significant difference. And he wasn’t complicit in unwittingly or otherwise airbrushing the plight of the oppressed underclass of one country, supposedly to help publicise the oppression of another. Do you think Australian representatives are discussing China’s human rights at the London Metals Exchange?

There is economic apartheid in Australia today and the situation is akin to the era of racial apartheid in South Africa when local human rights activists called upon other countries for trade boycotts and travel embargoes. Perhaps if Australia’s left wasn’t permanently out to lunch then something would be done along these lines but for now you need to be aware that Australia isn’t free and oppression doesn’t begin or end at national borders. Ever since the eighties when we spiralled into a Dickensian nightmare of extreme capitalism and hidden unemployment Australia has had the highest rate of youth suicide in the Western world.

So next time you send a letter to be read at a writers festival, you could spare a thought for the oppressed of your host country rather than playing into the hands of Australia’s oligarchy. That way, you’d have a credible claim to be advancing the cause of universal human rights rather than providing grist to the mill of Cold War warriors in the Murdoch press et al. Thanks for reading this Liao, hope I haven’t hurt your feelings but I thought it was about time you took a walk in our shoes. Since you can’t come in person to Australia I’m giving you a virtual tour but if you ever get a visa then look me up and I’ll show you the real Australia you don’t see in tourist brochures.

Yours Sincerely,
Bernadette Smith

Mike Whitney: In your article “Global forces driving Middle East uprisings,” you suggest that the revolutions spreading across the Middle East are a reaction to neoliberalism. This is very different from what we read in the western media. The MSM seems more preoccupied with tyrants and “democracy” than economics and workers struggles. Would you explain what you think is going on?

Nick Beams: In my article I tried to point to the underlying economic forces driving the upheavals in the Middle East and which led to the entry of the working class into political arena. This struggle has begun as a fight against the autocratic and dictatorial regimes which impose the neoliberal economic agenda on behalf of international finance capital – both Tunisia and Egypt as well as Libya to some extent were held up by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as examples of what should be done in the Middle East and North Africa.

The focus on the economic driving forces makes clear that genuine democracy will not be achieved by changing the faces of the old regime or even by introducing a parliamentary form of rule and elections. Real democracy can only come through the taking of political power by the working class and the establishment of a socialist economy, based on meeting social needs not the dictates of the profit system. Clearly such a perspective can only be realized on an international scale. Is such a perspective realistic? Are the serious of uprisings we have witnessed over the past three months confined merely to the Middle East? Not at all because, as I noted, the massive growth of social inequality, unemployment, falling real wages and ever worsening prospects for young people are global phenomena. We are only at the beginning of a world-wide upheaval, a new period of social revolution.

It is true that there has been much attention given in the mass media to “tyrants” and “democracy.” It needs to be pointed out that in the major capitalist countries the same neoliberal agenda, with the same consequences, is being imposed by what can best be described as “parliamentary dictatorships.” Two years ago the American people voted for “change you can believe in.” The Obama administration, however, serves the same corporate, financial and military interests as the Bush regime, in some cases even more ruthlessly. In Britain, at the elections last May the overwhelming majority of the electorate voted against the spending cuts – the deepest since the Great Depression – now being implemented by the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition. In the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx explained that every capitalist government was simply the executive committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. The present crisis has, so to speak, burned away the ideological and political coverings which served to obscure this essential truth for decades.

MW: Has the media created a false narrative to deceive people about what is really happening in the Middle East?

NB: The media, especially in the US, and everywhere else, including where I live, Australia, either directly serves the ruling elites or at least frames the so-called political debates within certain “acceptable” limits. The mass of the people are lied to – the lead-up to the Iraq war was only the most egregious example. This is why WikiLeaks has attracted such vicious opposition from within ruling circles, while at the same time receiving strong support from ordinary people all over the world.

Within the so-called mainstream mass media there is an almost total exclusion of the question of social class. Any mention of the enormous growth of social inequality is greeted with the cry “you are promoting a class war agenda” and declared out of bounds.

But notwithstanding the role of the mass media, hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions, have identified with the struggle of the Egyptian masses – an expression of growing class consciousness. This is why we have seen slogans such as “Walk like an Egyptian” and references to “Hosni Walker” in the struggle in Wisconsin.

MW: Have the unions or other workers groups played much of a role in the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia or Libya?

NB: The working class has played an extremely powerful role in the Egyptian revolution. It is its real driving force. It was the intervention of the working class, in the form of a series of strikes on February 9 and 10 and the developing movement towards a general strike that was the crucial factor in the decision of the upper echelons of the military that Mubarak had to go. I have gone further into these questions in a comment published on the World Socialist Web Site on February 25.

In Egypt, the official trade union apparatus was part of the regime and functioned as its direct instrument. But in that role it was not fundamentally different from the trade unions in the US or Australia. In the US, the UAW has played the key role in “restructuring” the auto industry and in Wisconsin the unions have already agreed to the cuts demanded by Walker. Their key demand is that the dues checkoff system remain. In Australia, the trade unions are the policemen for the Labor government’s Fair Work Australia legislation which makes any independent activity by workers virtually illegal.

In regard to Tunisia, there has been an attempt to glorify the role of the UGTT (the General Union of Tunisian Workers). The International Socialist Organization (ISO), for example, claimed that the UGTT had “proved to be a critical nucleus for organizing and uniting the employed and unemployed in protest.” In fact, the first reaction of the UGTT was to denounce the protest. The UGTT was central to implementing the IMF-backed “reforms” in Tunisia. See The American middle class “left” and the Tunisian revolution.

MW: Do you think that the United States can play a constructive role in helping the people of the region achieve their objectives?

NB: The first point to make it that the United States is not a unified whole. The Obama administration is working desperately to ensure that the situation in the Middle East is restabilized and that pro-imperialist regimes remain in charge. In the case of Libya, this may well involve direct military intervention under the pretext of averting a “humanitarian disaster” and dealing with the “tyrant” Gaddafi, with whom the US and the European powers have enjoyed the most cordial relations over the past decade.

The Libyan situation makes clear that nothing can really be understood about the events in the Middle East if they are examined through a simplistic pro and anti-democracy framework. The eruption against Gaddafi certainly began as a movement from below, from among the poorest layers of society. But at the same time the leadership of this movement has been seized by elements of the old regime who, up until just a few days ago, were loyal servants of the Gaddafi regime, having enforced its repression in the past. The independent interests of the working class must be disentangled from and developed against those sections of the bourgeoisie which are seeking to maintain control by breaking from the old order.

The rapid fracturing of the Libyan regime at the very first sign of serious opposition must indicate that divisions had been developing over the preceding period. In my opinion this too is bound up with the free market and privatization agenda pursued by the regime. It is one thing when the accumulation of wealth, power and privilege is bound up with state control over the economy, but when a process of privatization gets under way all sorts of divergent interests within the ruling apparatus can emerge. We saw this in Egypt as well with the intense hostility to Gamal Mubarak from sections of the regime because he was so closely involved with and benefited from the free market agenda of the past five years – an agenda which cut across their interests.

The American workers and students as well as the American people in general can certainly play a powerful role in aiding the movement in the Middle East by opposing the predatory plans of the Obama administration. But this is not a question of external solidarity. The most important question is to understand that workers all over the world are now involved in the common struggle against the global ruling classes. In this struggle, advances in one part of the world will materially assist struggles everywhere.

There is already a growing sentiment, after decades in which the class struggle has been suppressed by the trade union and social democratic apparatuses, that it is possible to fight. In the wake of the events in Egypt, workers everywhere can much more easily grasp what socialists mean when they explain that it is necessary for the working class to begin an independent struggle to assert its own economic and political interests against the entire official political apparatus and its servants in the trade unions. And a movement in America will give an enormous impetus to this process. The events in Wisconsin have already had a power effect and the more the independent struggle of the American working class develops the more the workers’ movement in every country will be strengthened.

MW: In your article, you quote Leon Trotsky who said that whatever its particular form, the situation in each country is “an original combination of the basic features of the world process.” Will you explain what this means and what bearing it might have on events in the ME?

NB: The passage I quoted comes from Trotsky’s introduction to the German edition of Permanent Revolution.

Anyone who wants to gain a real understanding of internationalism can do no better than read and study this work. Trotsky insisted, against the positions advanced by the Stalinist apparatus and its doctrine of socialism in one country, that internationalism rested above all on an understanding of the historical bankruptcy of the national state.

This analysis has the most direct bearing on events in the Middle East. It means that the movement of the working class will go forward to the extent that it is recognized that it is part of a struggle of the international working class. This is not a question of some kind of abstract phrase-mongering but the key to understanding difficult and complex historical questions that must be clarified if the movement is to go forward. In the final analysis, the decay and disintegration of all the national movements – from that of Nasser, to the PLO, and even Gaddafi, is not the outcome of “betrayals” by this or that leader but is rooted in the fact that they all based themselves on the national state.

And that is the same issue which confronts the working class in the major capitalist countries. The decay and disintegration of the trade unions and their transformation into the outright agencies of the corporations and the state is not a result of individual betrayals but flows from the fact that these organizations were based on the national state.

The working class needs new organizations, above all the construction of a world party grounded on the program of international socialism. That is the perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site.

* The term “Shock Doctrine” comes from Naomi Klein’s highly-recommended book of the same name. Published by Metropolitan Books. Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

Before he began promoting Julia Gillard, Israel Lobbyist, Albert Dadon, was “one of Kevin Rudd’s most trusted kitchen cabinet advisers on Israel.”¹ Pre-PM Rudd was cultivated by Dadon, who had organised two trips to Israel for him. Dadon also established the Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange.

Through his marriage into the billionaire Besen family (e.g., Highpoint Property Group, Suzanne and Sportsgirl shopping chains), Dadon is related to Morry Schwartz who published Rudd’s ‘Faith in Politics’ essay in his magazine, The Monthly, in 2006, giving him a public profile from which to become PM. In Rudd’s essay, our ex-PM praised his Christian hero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was an outspoken defender of “the marginalised, the vulnerable and the oppressed” during the Nazi’s rule. Sounds like good human rights stuff.

But as PM, Rudd showed indifference to the “marginalised, vulnerable and the oppressed” Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead. Rather than endorsing the UN Human Rights Council Report on the atrocities of Operation Cast Lead (The Goldstone Report) along with the vast majority of the UN General Assembly in November 2009, he voted against it, deferring to his pro-Israeli rich on whom he depends for friends and funds. To quote his own essay, Rudd seems to prefer “the hypocrisy of the religious and political elites of his time.”

When Mossad (Israeli spies) assassinated a Palestinian in Dubai last January, there of course was no outcry from Canberra. But then it was revealed that the assassins stole the identities of four Australian citizens and forged four Australian passports. It appears that Prime Minister Rudd stopped listening to his “trusted kitchen cabinet advisers on Israel”. Perhaps he recognized some responsibility to the Australian people who elected him, not the Israelis that promoted him in the first place. Kevin Rudd, who had been considered a friend of Israel, declared on radio (3AW) that- “any state that chooses to do this in relation to Australian passports, frankly, is treating the Australian people, the Australian government and the Australian nation with contempt.”²

Subsequently, Australia expelled the Mossad chief in Canberra, much as senior Mossad agents were expelled in the UK and Ireland. Indeed, Israel also fired their Mossad (Israeli spy) chief, Meir Dagan³ because of this extrajudicial assassination.

Danby and Rudd

One member of Rudd’s government and Labour Party, the proud Zionist, Michael Danby, preferred to defend Israel interests over Australian interests, saying “The expulsion [of the Israeli spy] was the wrong policy response. Even if there was some obscure previous incident, Berlin and Paris are as sophisticated as the mandarins of Canberra and their reaction (no expulsion) demonstrates why we did not have to ape the British Foreign Office. Stephen Smith should have made a recommendation to the NSC having the more worldly overview, that this harsh proscription would feed the international campaign of delegitimation of Israel.”⁴

Pro-Israel journalist, Greg Sheridan, states that Danby ‘is in no sense a marginal figure in Labor. He is a former secretary of Labour’s national security committee, a former Labour whip, and the chairman of the parliamentary foreign affairs sub-committee, that is the most senior parliamentarian, outside the ministry, on foreign affairs.’⁵

Danby continued, “This folly, this over-reaction, has unwittingly encouraged bigots elsewhere, who have their secret passions sanctioned. I have suggested a series of steps to the Prime Minister to overcome this successful attempt to blot Labor’s copybook just weeks before an election.”

A week after the announcement of the Mossad chief expulsion, Sheridan, reported, “The Earth moved between Israel and Australia this week, with Kevin Rudd’s government expelling an Israeli diplomat over the Dubai passports affair, and it may be that the Earth moved in Australian politics as well.”⁵ This was said three weeks before the coup!

The Israel Lobby and Rudd

The Israel Lobby arranged a meeting with Rudd on the 3rd of June 2010. In the meantime, Israeli commandos attacked the Mavi Marmara ship in international waters, killed 9 people, injured over 50, and kidnapped and treated with contempt over 700 people (UN Human Rights Council report on the attack on the Freedom Flotilla). Amongst the injured were unarmed Australians – not a good introduction for promoting Israeli interests.

Present at the Rudd-Israel Lobby meeting on the 3rd of June were Michael Danby and Albert Dadon.⁶ Dadon is close to Danby, but likes to be a “behind-the-scenes man.”¹ Also present were:

• Mark Dreyfus, another Jewish Zionist ALP MP
• Mark Leibler (Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council chairman)
• Robert Goot (Executive Council Australian Jewry president)
• Philip Chester (Zionist Federation of Australia president).

The Lobby left the meeting, without resolving their ‘difference of opinion’ with Rudd about Australia’s expulsion of the resident Mossad chief.((Australian Jewish News, 10/6/2010, ‘Rudd reaches out to leaders’ by Naomi Levin.)) Rudd was still not taking advice from Australia’s ersatz foreign minister, Danby, nor from one of his ‘most trusted kitchen cabinet advisers on Israel’, Dadon, nor, indeed, from the rest of the Israel Lobby.

Rudd anticipated his own demise saying “What am I, chopped liver?” after meeting these Lobbyists.⁷ Pro-Israel journalist, Greg Sheridan, of The Australian reported that expulsion of the Mossad chief ‘may be the single foreign policy issue that did Rudd the most harm in domestic political terms.’⁸ Did these so-called Australians tell our Prime Minister: “You expel our Mossad chief, we expel you”?

More Faceless Men in the Coup

One week later, Bill Shorten asked Julia Gillard to challenge Rudd, but she declined.⁹ Two weeks later (on 24/6/2010), coup plotters, Michael Danby, Bill Shorten, David Feeney, Joe Ludwig and Paul Howes¹⁰ were able to persuade Gillard to challenge and reassure her that she had the numbers. Dadon had cultivated Julia Gillard and her hairdresser spouse during a trip to Israel last year for the first Australia-Israel Leadership Forum and has been active in promoting her, as well as employing her spouse in a well-paid job.

What characterises these coup plotters? Danby is intimately associated with the Israel Lobby. Interestingly, after initial reports of his role as coup instigator,¹⁰ it seems his role has been hushed up. The other four coup-plotters are united in their deference to the Israel lobby. Shorten, Ludwig and Howes had free “Rambam fellowship” trips to Israel in 2003, 2007 and 2009 respectively.

Shorten was patronised by Zionist billionaire, Richard Pratt (owned Visy), which included being flown in Pratt’s private jet to the Beaconsfield mine disaster in 2006 to launch his parliamentary career.¹¹

Ludwig advocates in Parliament for the continued collective punishment of 1.5 million people in Gaza, and against a motion by Senator Kerry Nettle.¹²

Howes is leader of a counter-campaign against the union endorsement of Boycott Apartheid Israel movement.¹³ He also is singled out by Antony Loewenstein in My Israel Question (2009) as expressing sentiments ‘straight out of the Zionist lobby playbook.’¹⁴

Feeney also expressed sentiments straight out of the Zionist lobby playbook when he rejected the union movement’s report on the appalling conditions in Gaza (Hansard 12/5/2010) after it was attacked last year.¹⁵

Comments from Australian Officials

After the coup, two former Australian ambassadors to Israel, Ross Burns and Peter Rodgers, complained of “a much more determined pro-Israel position and I think Gillard is a part of that.”¹⁶

The Israel Lobby had sent a signal. Governments, who waver on their commitment to Israel, do so at their peril. Soon after, Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, used “the first major speech of the [election] campaign to pledge fidelity to…” Australia? No, to Israel!¹⁷ Abbott promised that ‘we would never over-react to any international incidents’ by Israel. He seems to know where the money and power is. The word ‘over-react’ is the same talking point used by Danby two months previously.

When the theft of Australian identities by Israel first became apparent in February of this year, the National Times quoted an “Australian official” who was too scared to have his name published, presciently observing that”It wouldn’t matter whether it was John Howard or Kevin Rudd or Tony Abbott in the prime minister’s chair, they [the Israelis]… know they’ve got us by the balls,” partly because of the strength of the Israel lobby.”¹⁸

Pilgrimage to Tel Aviv

In December 2010, 17 members of our Federal parliament are going to Israel for the second “Australia-Israel Leadership Forum.”¹⁹ Leading them will be Australia’s de facto Foreign Minister, Danby. No other country receives such a contingent of Australian senior civil servants. But who will they be servants to – the leaders in Israel? Last month (16th October), Rabbi Avodia Yosef, the founder and spiritual leader of the Shas Party, one of the three major components of the current Israeli government, gave the following speech: “Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel.”²⁰

1. The Age. 25/6/09, ‘Gillard accused of soft line on Tel Aviv’ by Dan Oakes and Dylan Welch.
2. Herald-Sun, 25/2/2010, ‘Three Australians named as new suspects in the assassination of a Hamas militant,’ by Phillip Hudson and Elissa Doherty.
3. Jerusalem Post, 7/3/2010, ‘Security and defense: Why is the Dagan era ending,’ by Yaakov Katz.
4. The Australian, 29/5/ 2010, ‘Expelling Israeli diplomat was a confected, self-serving exercise,’ by Greg Sheridan.
5. The Australian, 29/5/2010, ‘Badly misjudged action will have a political cost,’ by Greg Sheridan.
6. Australian Jewish News, 10/6/2010, ‘Rudd reaches out to leaders’ by Naomi Levin.
7. Sydney Morning Herald, 22/6/2010, “What am I, chopped liver? How Rudd dived into schmooze mode,” by Peter Hartcher.
8. The Australian, 1/7/2010, ‘Continuity but questions remain,’ by Greg Sheridan.
9. Adelaide Advertiser, 25/6/2010, ‘Why a coup was on the menu for Gillard,’ by Simon Benson and Steve Lewis.
10. The Age, 24/6/2010, ‘Gillard becomes Australia’s first female PM after Rudd goes down without a fight,’ by staff reporters.
11. ABC’s Sunday Profile, 14/5/2006, ‘Bill Shorten: The voice of the Beaconsfield mine rescue,’ interview with Julia Baird.
12. Hansard, page 350, 14/2/2008. See also jiw.blogspot.
13. Antony Loewenstein, 13/5/2009, ‘When unions back oppression.’
14. Page 339.
15. See Vexnews 22/5/2010, ‘Square off: Prodigal son returns to lash those who hate Israel.’
16. The Age, 29/6/2010, ‘Gillard accused of soft line on Tel Aviv,’ by Dan Oakes and Dylan Welch.
17. The Age, 20/7/2010, ‘Loyal to Israel despite killings,’ by Jacob Saulwick.
18. National Times, 26/2/2010, ‘Betrayed PM should not be taken for granted,’ by Peter Hartcher.
19. The Australian, 25/10/2010, ‘Record number of pollies for Israel,’ by John Lyon.
20. Haaretz, 20.10.2010, ‘ADL slams Shas spiritual leader for saying non-Jews were born to serve Jews,’ by Natasha Mozgovaya.

There is understandably hysteria on high, with demands that the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is “hunted down” and “rendered”. In Washington, I interviewed a senior Defence Department official and asked, “Can you give a guarantee that the editors of Wikileaks and the editor in chief, who is not American, will not be subjected to the kind of manhunt that we read about in the media?” He replied, “It’s not my position to give guarantees on anything”. He referred me to the “ongoing criminal investigation” of a US soldier, Bradley Manning, an alleged whistleblower. In a nation that claims its constitution protects truth-tellers, the Obama administration is pursuing and prosecuting more whistleblowers than any of its modern predecessors. A Pentagon document states bluntly that US intelligence intends to “fatally marginalise” Wikileaks. The preferred tactic is smear, with corporate journalists ever ready to play their part.

On 31 July, the American celebrity reporter Christiane Amanapour interviewed Secretary of Defence Robert Gates on the ABC network. She invited Gates to describe to her viewers his “anger” at Wikileaks. She echoed the Pentagon line that “this leak has blood on its hands”, thereby cueing Gates to find Wikileaks “guilty” of “moral culpability”. Such hypocrisy coming from a regime drenched in the blood of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq – as its own files make clear – is apparently not for journalistic enquiry. This is hardly surprising now that a new and fearless form of public accountability, which Wikileaks represents, threatens not only the war-makers but their apologists.

Their current propaganda is that Wikileaks is “irresponsible”. Earlier this year, before it released the cockpit video of an American Apache gunship killing 19 civilians in Iraq, including journalists and children, Wikileaks sent people to Baghdad to find the families of the victims in order to prepare them. Prior to the release of last month’s Afghan War Logs, Wikileaks wrote to the White House asking that it identify names that might draw reprisals. There was no reply. More than 15,000 files were withheld and these, says Assange, will not be released until they have been scrutinised “line by line” so that names of those at risk can be deleted.

The pressure on Assange himself seems unrelenting. In his homeland, Australia, the shadow foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has said that if her right-wing coalition wins the general election on 21 August, “appropriate action” will be taken “if an Australian citizen has deliberately undertake an activity that could put at risk the lives of Australian forces in Afghanistan or undermine our operations in any way”. The Australian role in Afghanistan, effectively mercenary in the service of Washington, has produced two striking results: the massacre of five children in a village in Oruzgan province and the overwhelming disapproval of the majority of Australians.

Last May, following the release of the Apache footage, Assange had his Australian passport temporarily confiscated when he returned home. The Labor government in Canberra denies it has received requests from Washington to detain him and spy on the Wikileaks network. The Cameron government also denies this. They would, wouldn’t they? Assange, who came to London last month to work on exposing the war logs, has had to leave Britain hastily for, as puts it, “safer climes”.

On 16 August, the Guardian, citing Daniel Ellsberg, described the great Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu as “the pre-eminent hero of the nuclear age”. Vanunu, who alerted the world to Israel’s secret nuclear weapons, was kidnapped by the Israelis and incarcerated for 18 years after he was left unprotected by the London Sunday Times, which had published the documents he supplied. In 1983, another heroic whistleblower, Sarah Tisdall, a Foreign Office clerical officer, sent documents to the Guardian that disclosed how the Thatcher government planned to spin the arrival of American cruise missiles in Britain. The Guardian complied with a court order to hand over the documents, and Tisdall went to prison.

In one sense, the Wikileaks revelations shame the dominant section of journalism devoted merely to taking down what cynical and malign power tells it. This is state stenography, not journalism. Look on the Wikileaks site and read a Ministry of Defence document that describes the “threat” of real journalism. And so it should be a threat. Having published skilfully the Wikileaks expose of a fraudulent war, the Guardian should now give its most powerful and unreserved editorial support to the protection of Julian Assange and his colleagues, whose truth-telling is as important as any in my lifetime.

I like Julian Assange’s dust-dry wit. When I asked him if it was more difficult to publish secret information in Britain, he replied, “When we look at Official Secrets Act labelled documents we see that they state it is offence to retain the information and an offence to destroy the information. So the only possible outcome we have is to publish the information.”

One of the most dramatic is the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which operated successfully as a government-owned bank for most of the 20th century, until it was privatized in the 1990s. The Commonwealth Bank’s creative founders demonstrated that a government-backed bank can make loans without capital. Denison Miller, the Bank’s first Governor, was fond of saying that the Bank did not need capital because “it is backed by the entire wealth and credit of the whole of Australia.”

The Commonwealth Bank’s accomplishments were particularly remarkable considering that for its first eight years, from 1912 to 1920, it did not have the power to issue the national currency –unlike the U.S. Federal Reserve, which acquired that power in 1913. The Commonwealth Bank was thus in the same position as a state of the United States or a member country of the European Union (think Greece), which also lack the power to issue their own currencies. Operating without that power and without startup capital, the Commonwealth Bank funded both massive infrastructure projects and the country’s participation in World War I. According to David Kidd, writing in a 2001 article titled “How Money Is Created in Australia”:

Australia’s own government-established Commonwealth Bank achieved some impressive successes while it was ‘the peoples’ bank’, before being crippled by later government decisions and eventually sold. At a time when private banks were demanding 6% interest for loans, the Commonwealth Bank financed Australia’s first world war effort from 1914 to 1919 with a loan of $700,000,000 at an interest rate of a fraction of 1%, thus saving Australians some $12 million in bank charges. In 1916 it made funds available in London to purchase 15 cargo steamers to support Australia’s growing export trade. Until 1924 the benefits conferred upon the people of Australia by their Bank flowed steadily on. It financed jam and fruit pools to the extent of $3 million, it found $8 million for Australian homes, while to local government bodies, for construction of roads, tramways, harbours, gasworks, electric power plants, etc., it lent $18.72 million. It paid $6.194 million to the Commonwealth Government between December, 1920 and June, 1923 – the profits of its Note Issue Department – while by 1924 it had made on its other business a profit of $9 million, available for redemption of debt. The bank’s independently-minded Governor, Sir Denison Miller, used the bank’s credit power after the First World War to save Australians from the depression conditions being imposed in other countries. . . . By 1931 amalgamations with other banks made the Commonwealth Bank the largest savings institution in Australia, capturing 60% of the nation’s savings.

Harnessing the Secret Power of Banking for the Public Good

The Commonwealth Bank was able to achieve so much with so little because its first Governor, Denison Miller, and its first and most ardent proponent, King O’Malley, had both been bankers themselves and knew the secret of banking: that banks create the “money” they lend simply by writing accounting entries into the deposit accounts of borrowers.

This banking secret was confirmed by a number of early banking insiders. In a 1998 paper titled “Manufacturing Money,” Australian economist Mike Mansfield quoted the Rt. Hon. Reginald McKenna, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who told shareholders of the Midland Bank on January 25, 1924, “I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. The amount of money in existence varies only with the action of the banks in increasing or decreasing deposits and bank purchases. We know how this is effected. Every loan, overdraft or bank purchase creates a deposit, and every repayment of a loan, overdraft or bank sale destroys a deposit.”

Dr. Coombs, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, said in an address at Queensland University on September 15, 1954, “[W]hen money is lent by a bank it passes into the hands of the person who borrows it without anybody having less. Whenever a bank lends money there is therefore, an increase in the total amount of money available.”

Ralph Hawtrey, Assistant Under Secretary to the British Treasury in the 1930s, wrote in “Trade Depression and the Way Out”, “When a bank lends, it creates money out of nothing.” In his book The Art of Central Banking, Hawtrey expanded on this statement, writing, “When a bank lends, it creates credit. Against the advance which it enters amongst its assets, there is a deposit entered in its liabilities. But other lenders have not the mystical power of creating the means of payment out of nothing. What they lend must be money that they have acquired through their economic activities.”

Banks can do what no one else can: “create the means of payment out of nothing.” The Commonwealth Bank’s far-sighted founders harnessed this guarded banking secret to serve the public interest.

The Bank Collapse of 1893 Spawns a New Public Banking Model

The Commonwealth Bank was founded under conditions like those prevailing today: the country had just suffered a massive banking collapse. In the 1890s, however, there was no FDIC insurance, no social security, no unemployment insurance to soften the blow. People who thought they were well off suddenly found they had nothing. They could not withdraw their funds, write checks on their accounts, or sell their products or their homes, since there was no money with which to buy them. Desperate people were leaping from bridges or throwing themselves in front of trains. Something had to be done.

The response of the Labor government was to pass a bill in 1911 which included a provision for a publicly-owned bank that would be backed by the assets of the government. In a rare move for the time, the bank was to have both savings and general bank business. It was also the first bank in Australia to receive a federal government guarantee.

Jack Lang was Australia’s Treasurer in the Labor government of 1920-21 and Premier of New South Wales during the Great Depression. A controversial figure, he was relieved of his duties after he repudiated loans owed to the London bankers. In The Great Bust: The Depression of the Thirties (McNamara’s Books, Katoomba, 1962), Lang described the Commonwealth Bank’s triumphs and tribulations in revealing detail. He wrote:

The Labor Party decided that a National Bank, backed with the assets of the Government, would not fail in times of financial stress. It also realised that such a bank would be a guarantee that money would be found for home building and other needs. After the collapse of the building societies, there was a great scarcity of money for such purposes.

… Chief advocate of the cause of a Commonwealth Bank was King O’Malley, a colorful Canadian-American … Before coming to Australia, he had worked in a small New York bank, owned by an uncle…. He had been much impressed by the way that his uncle had created credit. A bank could create the credit, and at the same time manufacture the debit to balance it. That was the big discovery of O’Malley’s banking career. A born showman, he itched to try it out on a grand scale. He started his political career in South Australia by advocating a State Commercial Bank. In 1901 he went into the first Federal Parliament as a one-man pressure group to establish a Commonwealth Bank, and joined the Labor Party for that purpose.

King O’Malley insisted that the Commonwealth Bank had to control the issue of its own notes, but he lost on that point – until 1920, when the Bank did take over the issuance of the national currency, just as the U.S. Federal Reserve was authorized to do in 1913. That was the beginning of the Commonwealth Bank’s central bank powers. But even before it had that power, the Bank was able to fund infrastructure and defense on a massive scale, and it did this without startup capital. These achievements were chiefly due to the insights and boldness of the Bank’s first Governor, Denison Miller.

The other bankers, fearing competition, had thought that by getting one of their own men in as the bank’s governor, they could keep it in line. But they had not reckoned on their independent appointee, who saw the opportunity posed by a government-backed bank and set out to make it the finest institution the country had ever known. As Lang tells the story:

The first test came when a decision was required regarding the amount of capital needed to start a bank of that kind. Under the Act, the Commonwealth had the right to sell and issue debentures totalling £1 million. Some even thought that amount of capital would be insufficient, having in mind what had happened in 1893….

When Denison Miller heard of it, his reply was that no capital was needed.

Miller was wary of going to the politicians for money. He could get by without capital. Like King O’Malley, he knew how banking worked. (This was, of course, before the modern-day capital requirements imposed from abroad by the central banker’s bank, the Bank for International Settlements.) Lang continued:

Miller was the only employee. He found a small office … and asked the Treasury for an advance of £10,000. That was probably the first and last time that the Commonwealth lent the Bank any money. From then on, it was all in the reverse direction.

By January, 1913 [Miller] had completed arrangements to open a bank in each State of the Commonwealth, and also an agency in London…. [O]n January 20th, 1913 he made a speech declaring the new Commonwealth Bank open for business. He said:  ‘This bank is being started without capital, as none is required at the present time, but it is backed by the entire wealth and credit of the whole of Australia.’

In those few simple words was the charter of the Bank, and the creed of Denison Miller, which he never tired of reciting. He promised to provide facilities to expand the natural resources of the country, and it would at all times be a people’s bank. ‘There is little doubt that in time it will be classed as one of the great banks of the world,’ he added prophetically.

… Slowly it began to dawn on the private banks that they may have harbored a viper. They had been so intent on the risks of having to contend with bank socialisation that they didn’t realise they had much more to fear from competition by an orthodox banker, with the resources of the country behind him.

… One of the first demonstrations of his vigor came when the Melbourne Board of Works went on the market for money to redeem old loans, and also to raise new money. Up to that time, apart from Treasury Bills and advances by their own Savings Banks, Governments had depended on overseas loans from London…. In addition to stiff underwriting charges, they found that the best they could expect would be £1 million at 4 per cent., at 97 1/2 net.

They then decided to approach Denison Miller, who had promised to provide special terms for such bodies. He immediately offered to lend them £3 millions at 95 on which the interest rate would be 4 per cent. They immediately clinched the deal. Asked where his very juvenile bank had raised all that money, Miller replied, ‘On the credit of the nation. It is unlimited.’

Another major test came in 1914 with the First World War:

The first reaction was the risk that people might start rushing to the banks to withdraw their money. The banks realised that they were still vulnerable if that happened. They were still afraid of another Black Friday.

There was a hurried meeting of the principal bankers. Some reported that there were signs that a run was already starting. Denison Miller then said that the Commonwealth Bank on behalf of the Commonwealth would support any bank in difficulties…. That was the end of the panic. But it put Miller on the box seat. Now, for the first time, the Commonwealth Bank was taking the lead. It was giving, not taking, orders….

Denison Miller … was virtually in control of the financing of the war. The Government didn’t know how it was going to be achieved. Miller did.

And so this interesting story continues. Miller died in 1923, and in 1924 the bankers got back in control, throttling the activities of the Commonwealth Bank and preventing it from saving Australians from the ravages of the 1930s Depression. In 1931, the bank board came into conflict with the Labor government of James Scullin. The Bank’s chairman refused to expand credit in response to the Great Depression unless the government cut pensions, which Scullin refused to do. Conflict surrounding this issue led to the fall of the government, and to demands from Labor for reform of the bank and more direct government control over monetary policy.

The Commonwealth Bank received almost all of the powers of a central bank in emergency legislation passed during World War II, and at the end of the war it used this power to begin a dramatic expansion of the economy. In just five years, it opened hundreds of branches throughout Australia. In 1958 and 1959, the government split the bank, giving the central bank function to the Reserve Bank of Australia, with the Commonwealth Banking Corporation retaining its commercial banking functions. Both banks, however, remained publicly-owned.

Eventually, the Commonwealth Bank had branches in every town and suburb; and in the bush, it had an agency in every post office or country store. As the largest bank in the country, it set the rates and set policy, which the others had to follow for fear of losing customers. The Commonwealth Bank was widely perceived to be an insurance policy against abuse by private banks, serving to ensure that everyone had access to equitable banking. It functioned as a wholly owned state bank until the 1990s, when it was privatized. Its focus then changed to maximization of profits, with steady and massive branch and agency closures, staff layoffs, and reduced access to Automated Teller Machines and to cash from supermarket checkouts. It has now become just another part of the banking cartel, but proponents say it was once the lifeblood of the country.

Today there is renewed interest in reviving a publicly-owned bank in Australia on the Commonwealth Bank model. The United States and other countries would do well to consider that option too. Any proposed legislation should contain careful checks for accountability. The Commonwealth Bank served Australia brilliantly well for its first 11 years under the stewardship of one honest man, Denison Miller. When he passed away in 1923, the bank was delivered into the hands of a board of businessmen more interested in serving their own interests than the nation’s. Legislation would need to be drafted that prevented that from happening again.

From a young age, I would embark with my family on the short journey from our refugee camp to the beach. We went on a haggard cart, laboriously pulled by an equally gaunt donkey. The moment our feet touched the warm sand, the deafening screams would commence. Little feet would run faster than Olympic champions and for a few hours all our cares would dissipate. Here there was no occupation, no prison, no refugee status. Everything smelled and tasted of salt and watermelon. My mother would sit atop a torn, checkered blanket to secure it from the wild winds. She would giggle at my father’s frantic calls to his sons, trying to stop them from going too deep into the water.

I would duck my own head underwater, and hear the haunting humming of the sea. Then I’d retreat, stand back and stare at the horizon.

When I was five or six, I believed that immediately behind the horizon there was a country called Australia. People from there were free to go and come as they pleased. There were no soldiers, guns, or snipers. The Australians — for some unknown reason — liked us very much, and would one day visit us. When I revealed my beliefs to my brothers, they were not convinced. But my fantasy grew, as did the list of all the other countries immediately behind the horizon. One of these was America, where people spoke funny. Another was France, where people ate nothing but cheese.

I would scavenge the beach looking for “evidence” of the existing world beyond the horizon. I looked for bottles with strange lettering, cans and dirty plastic washed ashore from faraway ships. My joy would be compounded when the letters were in Arabic. I would struggle to read them myself. I also learned of such countries as Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Morocco. People who lived there were Arabs like us, and Muslims who prayed five times a day. I was dumbfounded. The sea was apparently more mysterious than I’d ever imagined.

Before the first Palestinian uprising of 1987, the Gaza beach was yet to be declared off-limits and converted into a closed military zone. The fishermen were still allowed to fish, although only for a few nautical miles. We were allowed to swim and picnic, although not past 6 pm. Then one day the Israeli army jeeps came whooshing down the paved road that separated the beach from the refugee camp. They demanded immediate evacuation at gunpoint. My parents screamed in panic, herding us back to the camp in only our swimming shorts.

Breaking news on Israeli television declared that the Israeli navy had intercepted Palestinian terrorists on rubber boats making their way towards Israel. All were killed or captured, except for one that might be heading towards the Gaza sea. Confusion was ominous, especially as I saw images of captured Palestinian men on Israeli television. They were hauling the dead bodies of their Palestinian comrades while being surrounded by armed, triumphant Israeli troops.

I tried to convince my father to go and wait by the beach for the other Palestinians. He smiled pityingly and said nothing. The news later declared the boat was perhaps lost at sea, or had sunk. Still, I wouldn’t lose hope. I begged my mother to prepare her specialty tea with sage, and leave out some toasted bread and cheese. I waited until dawn for the “terrorists” lost at sea to arrive at our refugee camp. If they made it, I wanted them to have something to eat. But they never arrived.

After this incident, boats began showing up on the horizon. They belonged to the Israeli navy. The seemingly hapless Gaza sea was now dangerous and rife with possibilities. Thus, my trips to the beach increased. Even as I grew older, and even during Israeli military curfews, I would climb to the roof of our house, and stare at the horizon. Some boats, somewhere, somehow were heading towards Gaza. The harder life became, the greater my faith grew.

Today, decades later, I stand by some alien sea, far away from home, from Gaza. I have been denied the right to visit Palestine for years. I stand here and I think of all those back home, waiting for the boats to arrive. This time the possibility is real. I follow the news, with the stifling awareness of a grown up, and also with the giddiness and trepidation of my six year old self. I imagine Freedom Flotilla loaded with food, medicine and toys, immediately behind the horizon, getting close to turning the old dream into reality. The dream that all the countries that my brothers thought were fictitious, in fact, existed, embodied in five ships and 700 peace activists. They represented humanity, they cared for us. I thought of some little kids making a feast of toasted bread, yellow cheese and sage tea, waiting for their saviors.

When breaking news declared that the boats had been attacked just before crossing the Gaza horizon, killing and wounding many activists, the six-year-old in me was crushed. I wept. I lost the power to articulate. No political analysis could suffice. No news reports could explain to all the six-years-olds in Gaza why their heroes were murdered and kidnapped, simply for trying to breach the horizon.

But despite the pain that is now too deep, the lives that were so unfairly taken, the tears that were shed across the world for the Freedom Flotilla, I know now that my fantasy was not a child’s dream. That there were people from Australia, France, Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, the US and many other countries, who were coming to us in boats loaded with gifts from those who, for some reason, really liked us.

I cannot wait to get to Gaza, on top of a boat, so I can tell my brothers, “I told you so.”

U.S. and other NATO military contingents operating in the provinces of Afghanistan’s predominantly Pashtun south and east have been hiring private militias controlled by Afghan warlords, according to these sources, to provide security for their forward operating bases and other bases and to guard convoys.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has acknowledged that U.S. and NATO ties with warlords have been a cause of popular Afghan alienation from foreign military forces. But the policy is not likely to be reversed anytime soon, because U.S. and NATO officials still have no alternative to the security services the warlords provide.

A report published by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University in September notes that U.S. and NATO contingents have frequently hired security providers that are covertly owned by warlords who have “ready-made” private militias which compete with state institutions for power.

The report cites examples of major warlords or their relatives or allies who have been contracted for security services in four provinces.

In Uruzgan province, both U.S. and Australian Special Forces have contracted with a private army commanded by Col. Matiullah Khan, called Kandak Amniante Uruzgan, with 2,000 armed men, to provide security services on which their bases there depend. That case was reported in detail in April 2008 by two reporters for The Australian, Mark Dodd and Jeremy Kelly.

Col. Khan’s security force protects NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoys on the main road from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt, where more than 1,000 Australian troops are based at Camp Holland, according to the The Australian in April 2008.

Col. Khan gets 340,000 dollars per month — nearly 4.1 million dollars annually — for getting two convoys from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt safely each month. Khan, now police chief in Uruzgan province, evidently got his private army from his uncle Jan Mohammad Khan, a commander who helped defeat the Taliban in Kandahar in 2001 and was then rewarded by President Karzai by being named governor of Uruzgan in 2002.

The Australian Defence Force claimed to The Australian that Col. Khan is paid by the Afghan Ministry of Interior to provide security on the main highways of Uruzgan province. The Australian military had previously refused to confirm or deny Australian payments to Col. Khan.

CanWest News Service’s Mike Blanchfield and Andrew Mayeda reported in November 2007 that the Canadian military had hired a “General Gulalai” to provide security for an undisclosed forward operating base. Gulalai is a warlord in southern Afghanistan who drove the Taliban out of Kandahar in 2001.

The same reporters revealed that Col. Haji Toorjan, a local warlord allied with Kandahar governor and major warlord Gul Agha Sherzai, was hired to provide security for Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar City, where Canada’s provincial construction team is located.

Blanchfeld and Mayeda found that the Canadian military had given 29 contracts worth 1.14 million dollars to a company identified as “Sherzai”, suggesting strongly that the former governor of Kandahar, who had become governor of Nangarhar province, was the owner.

The Canadian military refused to confirm whether Gul Agha Sherzai is indeed the owner.

In Badakhshan province, Gen. Nazri Mahmed, a warlord who is said to “control a significant portion of the province’s lucrative opium industry”, has the contract to provide security for the German Provincial Reconstruction Team, according to the NYU report.

The report suggests that the U.S. and NATO contingents are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on contracts with Afghan security providers, most of which are local power brokers guilty of human rights abuses.

In addition to Ahmed Wali Karzai, it names Hashmat Karzai, another brother of President Karzai, and Hamid Wardak, the son of Defence Minister Rahim Wardak, as powerful figures who control private security firms that have gotten security contracts without registering with the government.

Two anonymous United Nations sources cited in the report estimate that 1,000 to 1,500 unregistered armed security groups have been “employed, trained, and armed by ISAF” and “Coalition Forces” for security services. As many as 120,000 armed individuals are estimated by the U.N. sources to belong to about 5,000 private militias in Afghanistan.

Most Afghan warlords are widely reviled, mainly because the private armies they continue to control carry out theft and violence against civilians without any accountability.

In his initial assessment last August, Gen. McChrystal referred to “public anger and alienation” toward ISAF, of which he is commander, as a result of the perception that ISAF is “complicit” in “widespread corruption and abuse of power”.

That remark suggests that McChrystal, who had carried out the Special Forces’ policy of relying on Afghan warlords for security in the past, was now expressing concern about its political consequences.

Jake Sherman, a co-author of the NYU report, was a United Nations political officer involved in the effort to disarm warlords from 2003 to 2005. He is sceptical that U.S. policy ties with the warlords will be ended.

“I don’t see how U.S. and other contingents could sustain forward operating bases without paying these guys,” said Sherman in an interview with IPS.

Beyond their continuing dependence on the warlords for security services, Sherman sees another reason for keeping them on the payroll. If the U.S. and NATO military commanders tried to cut their ties with the private militias, Sherman said the warlords “would actually become a security threat”.

Sherman recalled that during his period working for the United Nations in northern Afghanistan, local police were hired to guard a World Food Programme warehouse in Badakhshan. After a rocket attack on the warehouse, an investigation quickly turned up the fact that the police themselves had carried out the attack to pressure the U.N. to hire more guards.

The present U.S. and NATO dependence on warlord armies is rooted in the policy of the George W. Bush administration in the early years after the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001.

The Central Intelligence Agency put the commanders of the forces who had defeated the Taliban on the payroll and gave them weapons and communications equipment to help U.S. counterterrorism squads locate any al Qaeda remnants in Afghanistan.

The commanders used the U.S. support to consolidate their political control over different provinces or sub-provincial areas. Human Rights Watch observed in a June 2002 report on the new relationships forged between the United States and the warlords, “While the U.S. government does not view this policy as actively supporting local warlords, the distinction is often lost on Afghan civilians who see coalition forces openly interacting with the warlords.”

Larry Goodson of the National War College, who participated in the 2002 process called the Loya Jirga under which the first post-Taliban Afghan government was established, told IPS he had recommended from the beginning a “de-warlordisation” process, in which “we took nasty, sleazy characters and turn them into less nasty, sleazy bosses.”

But the warlords were kept on the payroll, Goodson recalls, mainly because the troops controlled by the former commanders were seen as “force multipliers”, in a situation where foreign troops were in short supply.

“The G8 made no firm commitment to help developing countries financially cope with the effects of rising seas, increased droughts and floods, or provide the technology to make their carbon-heavy economies more climate-friendly.” Nor did the G8 decide of a shorter-term target, despite warnings from a UN panel that they must cut emissions by between 25 percent and 40 percent by 2020, to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C.

Having committed Australia to a failure standard of 5 percent CO2 emission cut by 2020 relative to 2000, should no global agreement be reached in Copenhagen, Rudd’s “pessimism” regarding an agreement reminds of a lagging runner shouting at those in front “I told you so.”

If Howard’s earlier rejection of the Kyoto Protocol can be attributed to ignorance, there can be little excuse for Rudd’s virtual inaction in view of his insight: “At the end of the day, the atmosphere doesn’t sit around and neutrally observe grand political agreements.” In telling the Danish PM “negotiations for an agreement were not on track and that he was quite worried about it,” little mention is made that Australia, a rich coal exporter and one of the highest per-capita carbon emitter, has committed itself to standards that are virtually guaranteed to make no difference to runaway climate change.

Nor are CCS schemes likely to eventuate on a scale sufficient to mitigate emissions in time. While at a cost of US$0.50–8.00 per sequestration of a tonne of CO2, translated to about 15 to 240 $billion for sequestration of one year’s emissions of about 30 billion tons CO2, is only a fraction of what the world is spends on wars, the reluctance of the G8 to extend clean energy technology to developing countries does not bode well in this regard. Likely a similar fate awaits the CCS as Australia’s earlier SYNROC project, designed by Professor Ted Ringwood to store RADWASTE in radiation-proof cylinders placed in drill holes, but which was never applied on a commercial scale, due to high cost. Instead, radioactive waste is stored in leaking drums, dumpted into the oceans, and in part buried in salt mines.

Even if the above effort is made, current levels of near 450 ppm CO2-equivalent (which includes methane) requires fast tracked development and application of CO2 down-draw techniques aimed at reducing levels to below 350 ppm. At current emission rates of about 2 ppm CO2/year, by 2050 CO2-equivalent levels will exceed the 500 ppm level at which the Antarctic ice sheet has formed 34 million years ago, including likely tipping points out of human control.

NGOs are trying to make the difference, including Al Gore’s inspired new think tank (Safe Climate Australia — SCA), launched at an event to be attended by almost 1000 business leaders. SCA is modeled on a similar project, Repower America, which Mr Gore co-ordinates in the US. It will produce a blueprint for Australia’s transition to net zero carbon that will cover all major sectors of the Australian economy.

Rudd must know he was given a stark choice. He can continue to appease the big polluters or, alternatively, he could assume a Churchill-like leadership regarding what he has described as the “greatest moral challenged of our generation.”

The Hunter Valley was an extraordinary landscape of mines and vines: of pyramids of coal and slag, beyond which lay long green fingers of ripening grapes. My father left school at 14 and while he waited a year to go down the pit he went to work at Lindemans vineyard, now world famous, where he would bet young Ebenezer Mitchell he could beat him at tying down four acres of vines in a single day.

This is not to suggest that a bottle of “claret”, as all Australian red wine was then called, stood on the family table as I grew up. Beer in long-necked bottles was the national drink, and only the Belgians, I once read, drank more per head: a remarkable feat when you consider that Australians consumed most of theirs in the hour, or less, before the pubs closed at six o’clock.

I drank my first glass of red wine at La Veneziana restaurant in Sydney, then renowned for its clientele of journos, musos, refos (foreigners), unrequited artistes and women. The wine came with a sticking plaster as a label on which was written, in ball point, “red”. It was not highly regarded by those who said they knew about such things, but it launched me on a love affair with the red wine of my country that continued long after I sailed away. In my early days in London, I would yearn for the “sweaty saddle” of a great Coonawarra red from South Australia; and on my trips home, my father would greet me with a Draytons cabernet he had been keeping. He had grown up with the Drayton family in the Hunter. “It’s better than honest,” he would understate its fineness as we downed it.

Australia went on to conquer the world’s biggest wine markets, toppling even the French in Britain and the United States. Last year, Australia exported 62 percent of its wine. The average for France is 40 percent. Foster’s, the beer goliath, is now the world’s second biggest wine producer. Tesco, Sainsbury’s and the other British supermarket chains sell labels like Hardys and Rosemount for less than you can buy them in Australia. Along with under-cutting and marketing, the whispered secret is high alcohol. In recent years, the alcohol content of Australian reds has leapt two and even three percent. Australian Shiraz (the Syrah grape) has soared above 15 percent. Pour this into a large glass, as many restaurants do, and you are soon on your ear. The deceitful euphemism is “full-bodied.” In his astute New Statesman column (“Grapes of Wrath,” 13 November 2008), Roger Scruton noted that, “to force Syrah up to an alcoholic content of 14 percent or more, tricking it into early maturation, so as to put the result on the market with all its liquorice flavours unsubdued, puffing out its dragon breath like an old lecher leaning sideways to put a hairy hand on your knee, is to slander a grape that, properly treated, is the most slow and civilized of seducers.”

So this is a lament for civilized seducers. It is also a tale of how we allow ourselves to be mistreated with industrial versions of good things, like wine and food. The world’s fastest bottling plant is run by Casella Wines in New South Wales. Casella Wines invented a brand called Yellow Tail, which has the tail of a kangaroo on the label. It is “sunshine in a bottle.” Inexplicably promoted by the grand American wine critic Robert Parker, this industrial plonk swept the US market. Yellow Tail is produced in Australia’s endangered food bowl, guzzling precious irrigated water from the basin of the Murray and Darling rivers, both of which are dying as global warming creates environmental havoc in the earth’s driest continent. The recent bush fires demonstrated this savagely.

The shortage of water is so serious that the nation’s basic food supply is threatened. Homegrown fruit such as oranges have vanished from many shops. The commercial success of Yellow tail and other vapid factory wines has seen off not only the delicious flavors and distinct variety of so much Australian red wine, but is a striking illustration of the greed and destructiveness of “global” cash cropping: a sacred ideology until Wall Street crashed. We need a Felicity Lawrence to expose cleverly-branded, essentially lousy wine as she has exposed cleverly-branded, essentially lousy food.

The good news is that people are beginning to drink less of the stuff. According to the Financial Times, the “Yellow Tail Effect” is one of the factors causing bulk Australian wine exports to Britain and the US to drop by as much as 23 percent last year. Bruce March, chief winemaker of a winery north of Canberra, says that following the success of “sunshine in a bottle” in Britain, he was advised by marketing people to sell into China at the lowest possible price and to think about quality later. (He declined). “They told us,” he said, “don’t worry, the Chinese don’t know what they’re drinking.”

Many economists assure us the current recession will begin to subside by 2010, but the paradigm from which they conceptualize reality is incomplete, ignoring costs externalized by markets, such as the encroaching effects of habitat destruction. The fledgling and contagious social unrest at hand must be quickly organized, attitudinized and mobilized, for existing environmental, geopolitical and financial upheavals threaten the survival of many. Firstly, the outlook for food yields in 2009 is dismal: Many analysts have warned of a 20 to 40 percent drop in agricultural production, depending on the harshness and duration of the current global drought. Two years ago, however, Science published predictions of “permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” of the United States, and forecast levels of aridity akin to the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s that would envelope swaths of land from Kansas to California. The Hadley Center in the UK reported in November 2006,

“Extreme drought is likely to increase from under 3% of the globe today to 30% by 2100 —areas affected by severe drought could see a five-fold increase from 8% to 40%.”

This, of course, is a recipe for widespread desertification. The NOAA foresees drought of considerable duress—“ largely irreversible for 1,000 years”—and identifies the following key regions as facing, insofar as our contemporary purviews are considered, permanent Dust Bowls: (Romm )

• U.S. Southwest
• Southeast Asia
• Eastern South America
• Southern Europe
• Southern Africa
• Northern Africa
• Western Australia

Countries yielding two thirds of the world’s agricultural output are on the precipice of serious climatatic discontinuities reminiscent of the Global Climate Optimum of the 900 to 1300 variety. Food prices will soar, and, in poor countries where food is scarce, millions will starve. One thing we have to fall back on is our natural humanity, —not just our braininess and know how, but also the fact that the collective wet dream that constitutes our social reality skews how many of us can actually live now and in the future. Simply put, by ditching the wet dream and downsizing, we significantly better our plight. There are plenty of atavistics (those who are like, so last dark ages) among us, like Dianne Feinstein, who said that it is Californians “god-given right to water their lawns and gardens.” Southern Californian Scott Thill offers, in an article published by AlterNet, a new definition of the front lawn: “Gorgeously tended middle fingers to reality, which, like death and taxes always, has a way of winning in the end.”

The California drought is anticipated to be the worst in modern times. Already thousands of acres of crops are fallow, with no sign of slowing. Furthermore, the Northern Sierra snowpack for this past winter turned out to be 51% lighter than usual. According to the Los Angeles Times, the state is nearly out of water, leaving it with prayers of rain and a dwindling Northern California supply. Los Angeles has already begun allocation of water, which, as Scott Thill points out, means water to the rich (north) and away from the poor (south). He then portends evacuations and realignments, “by 2100, you will not recognize it.” East of southern California, 18 percent of Texas is burdened by severe drought.

In some countries historical relief efforts have been undertaken. The Chinese government has allocated 86.7 billion yuan (roughly $12.69 billion) to affected regions, and, moreover, lent a helping hand to its western colleagues during the financial crisis, but also to nature itself. Officials in Beijing blasted silver iodide into clouds over northern China to create precipitation as a means of alleviating the most severe drought experienced by the region in half a century. King your fingers crossed (or maybe not, there’’s no telling with these things!), as China produces 18% of the world’s grain each year.

Australia has been in the midst of an unremitting dry spell since 2004, as 41% of the country’s agriculture suffers the worst drought in the 117 years of record-keeping. Rivers have stopped flowing, lakes are being eradicated by toxicity, and farmers have left their land.

Shall we proceed? Argentina’’s worst drought in half a century has turned that country’s verdant landscapes to dust. The country has declared emergency. Soy plants are scorched by the sun and Argentina’’s food production is set to go down a minimum of 50 percent or greater. 2008’’s wheat yield was 16.3 million metric tons, whereas 2009′’s is projected to be merely 8.7 metric tons.

Africa faces food shortages due to lack of rainfall. Half the agricultural soil has lost nutrients necessary to grow plant. The Middle East and Central Asia, to boot, are suffering from contemporary nadir droughts and food grain production is at the lowest levels in decades. A major shortage of planting seed for the 2010 crop is expected.

Stocks of foodstuff are dangerously low worldwide. Agricultural commodities must rise in price so as to obviate even larger food shortages and famine. Wheat, corn, soybeans, etc. must become expensive enough so that every available acre is harvested with the best possible fertilizers. With food prices steady, production will continue to fall and millions would starve.

A spike in food price is likely to spark competitive currency appreciation in 2009. Foreign exchange reserves exist for this. Central banks the globe over would lower domestic food prices by either directly selling off their reserves to appreciate their currency or buying grain from the market. Appreciating a currency is the fastest way to control food inflation. The more valuable a currency the more monopolistic a nation over global resources —so, for example, an overvalued dollar enables the US to consume 25% of the world’s oil, despite only having 4% of the world’s population. Were China to sell off its US reserves, its population of over one billion would then suck up the world’s food supply. Prices soar around the world.

This process, however, would most likely not end up in the impoverishment of nation states per se, though almost certainly the disintegration of the modern middle class, already long past its youthful heyday. The American Dream has been repeatedly resuscitated over the last thirty years through portfolio insurance, Long-Term Capital Management, the internet, the housing market, and now the looters have taken to the streets—oh, excuse me; I mean to their theoretical electronic world—and pillaged the landscape.

Social unrest and soaring food prices go hand in hand, from sea to shining sea. Countries, so as to avoid revolutionary reform from the bottom up, would have no choice but to appreciate their currencies in order to cheapen food imports. China holds the best deck, and so then would sell off more of its reserves. The world’s reserve currency, the dollar, floats into precarious waters. As a fiat currency, the US dollar is, by its very nature, worthless. Trillions of US holdings could be liquidated in favor of food.

“”We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger.” (President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address 24 Feb 2009)

In Washington, talk of bailouts and relief are framed in the realm of economics and economics only, with no considerable deliberation of our species ecological outlook. The budget proposal is sold as a demand oriented New Deal-esque expansionary program, with health, education, renewable energy, investment infrastructure and transportation at its forefront. The hope is to stimulate employment, boost social programs and to revive the real economy. Michel Chossudovsky reports in a recent article published by Global Research, that —– surprise, surprise— — the “stimulus package” is the most substantial diverging of public spending ever, and serves the interests of Wall Street, in particular, the finance, oil and defense cartel. This in and of itself should cause social unrest, and certainly makes more likely the potential evaporation of the middle class.

The 2010 fiscal year, which begins on October 1st, will represent an increase in spending of 32%. The nucleus of the proposal inflates defense and the Middle East War funds, the Wall Street bank “bailouts that never end,” so-called by the New York Times, and interest on a debt that exceeds ten-fold the world’’s GDP. The bailout— financed, in part, by the recipients themselves, the creditors, which, as understood by the Treasury and the banks in the first place, meant the FED enjoyed sweeping authority over how the money was to be spent from the onset of this collapse—continues under the new proposed budget. Unlike Keynesian style deficits, this piling on of debt through the proposed budget would not stimulate investment and consumer demand; there will be no expansion of production and employment, for the giveaway of tax dollars to the financial oligarchs is no more than a monumental concentration of wealth and centralization of world banking power.

Washington places defense spending at $739.5 billion, though some estimates assert aggregate defense and military related spending at more than $1 trillion. The total of both bailouts—, Obama’s $750 billion piled on top of Bush’s $700 billion dollar bailout, —is 1.45 trillion dollars paid for by the Treasury. Virtually all federal government revenues would be expended to finance the bank handouts: 1.45 trillion, the war; $739 billion, and interest payments on public debt; $164 billion. And then the well is dry. There are no funds available for the social programs encapsulated in the stimulus package. Therefore, programs for healthcare and education will most likely be sold to private enterprise to fund the bankrupt state. Education is not the only state asset that is at risk of being privatized: Public infrastructure, urban services, highways, national parks, etc. are all at risk. The worsening fiscal collapse coalesces in the privatization of the state, tilling the land for a much more lucrative market in governance and social control.

Many economists hypothesize that the Obama administration is employing Zimbabwe School of Economics policies, where by hyperinflation is produced through the incessant printing of money, resulting in that currency’s fall to zero. Currently, we are seeing the simultaneous devaluation of the currency and the purchase of the world’’s commodities by corporations, government assets included; a process that will presumably leave the rest of us with toilet paper.

So, that leaves us with a raped resource base and a new system of globalized neo-feudalism. In 1800, —around the time of the Industrial Revolution—, there were 969,000,000 humans on earth. That leaves more than five billion redundant individuals whose lives were made possible by fossil fuels and abundance of water. A ubiquitous and enduring reorientation of human cognition is the key to survival: in short, reprioritization. This problem is of the utmost importance. A change of consciousness would result in a change in mass behavior. This starts at the obvious level: short-showers, low-flow everything, no lawns, total conservation and the reorientation of the economy based on renewable resources and sustenance. We must then work on disbelieving in our governments and the moribund banking system.

An all-pervasive insurgency, attacking multi-laterally the global industrial grid oligarchy, with broad but explicit aims— among which a new harmony with the natural world is foremost— must, before all else, work towards dismantling tyrannical corporations. Computers and electricity are the lifeblood of civilizations. Coordinated attacks against the electric grid, financial markets, and destroyers of the environment could be wildly successful, but could only be so as part of a talented and colossal movement with army-like discipline. Specialization comes in handy. The average American city has food for about half a month, which means economies will need know-how to localize and quick.

Another option would be to create companies of our own to challenge the global giants. Max Keiser, host of the Oracle on the BBC, has championed the idea of creating huge syndicates of boycotters against companies such as Coca-Cola and Exxon/Mobil. The money saved would be diverted to the world’s top activism organizations. The biggest take-home lesson when it comes to boycotts is this: the consumer wields enormous power. You’’ve been told it before and it’’s true. Boycotts of certain market elements such as the Fed Cartel (Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America), in which we move our money, refinance with another bank, sell our stock or quit our jobs, is a major step in the right direction.

Your television lies. Propagandistic news networks like CNN, NBC, ABC, Fox, etc are the only companies from whom Americans get their daily dose of news. The panoply of diverse news websites on the internet forms the most active resistance community around; further privatization and censoring of the internet must be actively challenged. The corporate attitudinized mass media dangles carrots in front of the consumer’s face from the confines of a hallucinatory feedback loop. Awash in an onslaught of terroristic American-style boulevard journalism, dimension is hard to find. The axioms with which the corporate-owned media frame reality are so far off base that it can be taxing for many of us to find the right ripostes while discussing our world with Nationalists. A good example is the recent slandering of Michel Phelps, caught toking with a relatively impressive piece of glass. The pro-marijuana movement has failed utterly, —though they are indeed going up against a billion dollar smear campaign— to gain traction with this simple notion: That had Michel Phelps not indulged in marijuana, his record breaking Olympic performance would have been inconceivable. There are many doctors who have championed the medical benefits of marijuana, some going so far as to suggest THC promotes brain cell growth.

Don’t join the military, for the US government and mercenaries view soldiers as cannon fodder or expendable assets; one in four soldiers in the US is homeless.

Wine-making vats are an excellent habitat for a multitude of micro-organisms. By fermenting the juice of crushed fruit, the organisms explode at first before depleting the once abundant nutrients needed for survival. They eventually die from the accrual of alcohol and carbon dioxide they themselves produced. We choke just the same on our industrial discharge, especially in agglomerations such as Southern California and BosWash on the eastern seaboard. By making our communities self-sustainable with clean energy such as solar, wind, geothermal, and magnetic— forever replacing the obsolete 80-year long enterprise known as the combustible engine—, we make ourselves and our families less dependent on the broken state-enterprise apparatus. Not to mention less toxic.

It’s important to remember, there’’s always the future. We must keep our humanity; —it’s much too late in the ballgame to be weighed down by our razor-thin ideologies, be they Marxism, Capitalism, Christianity, Islam, Nudism, Obamaism, Indie Rockism, Hyphy, Fuck the’ policeism, or what have you. Understanding, compassion, and altruism are the chords deep within our souls, and once struck it is clear that they are the essence of humanity.

Allow me to introduce you to a peculiar form of denial called anosognosia, the condition in which a person suffering from a disability due to brain injury appears unaware or denies the existence of the malady. This ailment applies to radical changes in one’s life, affecting the newly blind or paralyzed. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, suffered from anosognosia after a stroke on October 2, 1919. After the bloodletting of “the war to end all wars” subsided, Wilson’’s first priority was the establishment of the League of Nations, which he believed would help ensure world peace. With the help of those by his side, Wilson ignored the seriousness of his stroke, and continued to look forward to more campaigning in favor of the League, and even the possibility of a third term. Wilson was no more than wool gathering with such hopes in light of his incapacity.

The industrialized world’s superego is suffering from a terminal form of anosognosia: We have all gone insane. That we find solace in proclamations from economists that the current financial crisis will subside in a year’’s time, while momentarily watching the corporate nanny state’s complete submission to corporate rule, is further evidence of our aloofness. Our capacity for widespread social reform is great if only we exercise our power. Malcom X expressed his belief that one day there would be a clash between the rich and poor of the world, and, in all likelihood—, details of how it may or may not play out aside—, we are headed towards such a clash. So, before we starve between a stream and a berry bush, now is the time for us to reconsider our goals and desires. Next week is the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq. I suggest we all consider penciling it into our day planners.